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CONCENTRATION 
^WEALTH 

HBNHYI/AURBNS CALL 



JPeadJbefore tJie 

American ASSOCIATION for 

THE ADVANCEMENT^SCIENGE 
AT COLUMBIA COLLEGE NEW 
\ORK, DECEMBER 27, 1906 



THE CHANDLER PUBLISHING COMPANY 
BOSTON. HASS. 




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Book -._ 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



CONCENTRATION 
2;^ WEALTH 

HENRYLAURENS CALL 



J^eadiefore the 

American ASSOCIATION for 

THE ADVANCEMENT^SCIENCE 
AT COLUMBIA COLLEGE NEW 
YORK, DECEMBER 27, 1906 



93 



THE CHANDLER PUBLISHING COMPANY 
BOSTON, MASS. 

COPYRIGHT 1907. DY HENRY LAUREN5 CALL. 



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THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

A Half Century of Wealth Concentration . . . Page 1 

The Growing Poverty of Industrial Society . . Page 8 

A Reign of Corruption and Plunder Page 15 

Industrial Society Sold Into Bondage Page 22 

The Modern Corporation a Monstrosity .... Page 27 

The Corporation Should be Social, Co-operative Page 35 

Nature and Justice of the Required Remedy . Page 41 



A HALF CENTURY OF WEALTH CONCENTRATION 

It would be difficult to overestimate the material benefits 
received from Science and invention, during the last half or three- 
quarters of a century. 

In transportation, from the ox or horse team, overland wagon 
train, or slow sailing vessel, to the modern steam engines, electric 
trains, automobiles, and ocean grey -hounds; in agriculture, 
from the hoe, single shovel plow, hand-sickle, or flail, to steam 
plows, harvesters, and threshers; in printing, from hand type and 
presses, to the linotype and perfecting presses; in manufacture, 
from the common needle, spinning wheel, or hand loom, to the 
sewing machines, power looms, and all the other complex and 
powerful machinery now in use; — represent a transformation in 
the world's work and work-shop, almost beyond the power of the 
imagination to picture. 

These changes mark a transition from almost primitive 
methods, to those of the highest degree of complexity; and the 
multiplication of man's labor power ten, and often a hundred, 
and even a thousand, fold. 

Along with this increase in labor power, has gone also a vast 
increase in wealth production. The present wealth of the United 
States, if equally divided, would give $1,318 to every individual 
in the land, including babes, — or about l5,ooo to every family; 
as against I307 per capita, or 1 1,200 per family, in 1850.* 

Thus the wealth we have saved is four times greater to-day 
than a half-century ago. And this, be it remembered, is over and 
above the increased cost of living from the lavish maintenance of an 
ever growing idle class ; over and above the wealth sent to foreign 
lands in the purchase of estates, palaces, titles, and pleasures; 
over and above the billions destroyed in our great civil war; 
and, moreover, notwithstanding the fact that, under our present 
industrial system, a very large percentage of all our labor power 
is of the class properly termed nonproductive. But for the waste 

, *U. S. Census, 1900 and 1850. 



2 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

in these and other respects, in both our social and economic sys- 
tems, the above total would, perhaps, be not less than twice the 
sum given, — or 1 10,000 for every family in the land. 

As to our wealth creation, then, as also the means by which it 
has been accomplished, there can be little question; and if the 
subject of wealth can have any especial interest or concern, either 
for the scientist or the citizen, it must relate to that other prob- 

rlem of its distribution. 
I propose, therefore, in the following pages to inquire into, 
first, — The degree of wealth concentration in the United States; 
secondly,— the eifect of this wealth concentration upon the body 
of industrial society; thirdly, — the process by which it has been 
brought about; fourthly, — the causes leading thereto; fifthly, — 
the economic doctrines responsible therefor; sixthly, — the logical 
and necessary remedy for these conditions; and seventhly, — the 
nature and justice of the remedy required. 
|__, In the first place, then, I shall endeavor to contrast the 
conditions fifty years ago with those of to-day, in respect to 
wealth concentration. 

In 1854 there was published in the city of New York, a little 
volume* entitled "The Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy 
Citizens of the City of New York." Some fifteen years before, 
the leading merchants of the city had met together, and made 
calculations as to the wealth at the command of each, in "backing 
up" their business enterprises. As the list grew, and copies were 
in demand, a regular publication was agreed upon ; and this was 
entrusted to Moses Yale Beach, Esq., the publisher of the New 
York Sun. 

The book was then in its thirteenth annual edition; and in 
his preface the publisher says: — "The present edition is a careful 
revision of all previous ones, the largest .portion of the contents 
having been entirely rewritten. Neither labor nor pains has been 
spared to make it absolutely correct, and it is hoped not without 
success." Both from the character of the publisher, and from 
the fact that the volume was the work of the business men 
themselves, we may safely assume that its contents are reliable. 

From it we learn that in the year 1854 there were just 
twenty-five millionaires in the metropolis, with fortunes ranging 
from 1 1, 000,000 to $6,000,000 each. The combined fortunes of 
the twenty-five aggregated, in fact, but $43,000,000. 

Inasmuch as New York City was then, as now, much the most 
important financial center in the country, and as Philadelphia 
and Boston were the only other cities approaching it in size or 
importance, while Chicago and other cities of the central west 
were little more than villages, we may fairly assume that this list 

* " Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of the City of New 
York," By Moses Yale Beach, 1854. 



A HALF CENTURY OF WEALTH CONCENTRATION 3 

represented at least one-half of the entire number of millionaires 
then in the United States. In fact, a similar list pubHshed in 
Philadelphia nine years previously,* gave the entire number of 
Philadelphia millionaires as nine, with a probable aggregate of 
not to exceed 115,000,000 as the combined fortunes of the entire 
number. 

Allowing, then, for the increase in the number of Philadel- 
phia millionaires during the nine years, and allowing a propor- 
tionate number for Boston and other places, it would yet be 
safe to say that in the year 1854 there were not to exceed fifty 
millionaires in the whole of the United States, and that the com- 
bined fortunes of the entire fifty did not exceed |8o,ooo,ooo. If 
to these we add the fortunes of the half-millionaires, it would 
probably increase the aggregate or total wealth of all the really 
rich men then in the country to about 1 100,000,000. 

The census of 1850 gave the total wealth of the United States 
as slightly over $7,000,000,000; and the census of i860 gave it 
as slightly over 1 16,000,000,000. Assuming that one-third of 
the increase of $9,000,000,000 was made during the first four years 
of the decade, and adding this to the census of 1850, would give 
the total wealth of the nation, in 1854, as $10,000,000,000. 
Now, if the total wealth of the millionaires and half-millionaires 
at that date was, as shown by the above figures, $100,000,000, 
this gave to the rich men of the country, in 1854, just one-hun- 
dredth part, or one per cent., of the total aggregate wealth of 
the United States. 

The late Senator Ingalls, in a speech delivered in the United 
States Senate January 14, 1891, said:f "A table has been compiled 
for the purpose of showing how wealth in this country is dis- 
tributed, and it is full of the most startling admonition. It has 
appeared in the magazines; it has been commented upon in this 
chamber; it has been the theme of editorial discussion. It 
appears from this compilation that there are, in the United States, 
two hundred persons who have an average of more than $20,000,- 
000 each; four hundred persons possessing $10,000,000 each; 
one thousand persons possessing $5,000,000 each; two thou- 
sand persons possessing $2,500,000 each; six thousand persons 
possessing $1,000,000 each; and fifteen thousand persons $500,- 
000 each ; making a total of 3 1 , 1 00 persons who possess an aggre- 
gate of $36,250,000,000." 

In 1890, at the time the table mentioned by Senator Ingalls 
was compiled, the census gave the total wealth of the United 
States as slightly more than $65,000,000,000. Again, if at that 
time the millionaires and half-millionaires of the country owned, 

*" Wealth and Biography of the Weahhy Citizens of Philadelphia," by 
a Member of the Philadelphia Bar, 1845. 

t " Writings and Speeches of John J. Ingalls," Page 320. 



4 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

as Stated by Senator Ingalls, the enormous total of 136,250,000,- 
000, this gave them just fifty-six per cent, of the entire aggregate 
wealth of the United States; or, in other words, just fifty-six 
times as much of the nation's wealth, greatly as this had grown, 
as their humble predecessors the millionaires of thirty-six years 
before possessed. 

Equally startling is the growth of the individual fortunes of 
these men of millions. 

A writer in the Forum* placed the wealth of J. J. Astor, in 
1889, at 1150,000,000; Wm. Astor at 150,000,000; and W. W. 
Astor at 150,000,000. This would give the wealth of these 
three branches of the House of Astor as 1250,000,000. If to 
this we add the portions of the estate which had at various 
times gone to the daughters of the family, it would probably 
increase the combined wealth of the Astors, in 1889, to I300,- 
000,000; or just fifty times the wealth of the family in 1854. 
Similarily the wealth of the Vanderbilt family had grown, within 
the same period from $1,500,000 to $300,000,000; or just two 
hundred times the wealth of the great Cornelius in 1854. The in- 
crease in the fortunes of the Goelets, the Havemeyers, and others, 
show about the same proportions; while A. Belmont, who in 1854 
possessed a paltry $100,000, is credited in 1889 with a fortune of 
$30,000,000; or a multiplication of just three hundred times. 

Now, if to these we add the mushroom fortunes of John D. 
Rockefeller (in 1889) of $100,000,000, of Jay Gould $70,000,- 
000, of J. Pierpont Morgan and J. S. Morgan $25,000,000 each, 
and the host of others, almost equally as great, who were unheard 
of a half century ago, we can readily see how the wealth of our 
millionaires, as a class, had grown to fifty-six times as great a 
proportion of the nation's wealth in 1890, as thirty-six years 
before, in 1854. 

These estimates, it will be observed, were made seventeen 
years ago; and even at the ordinary rates of interest the $36,- 
250,000,000, supposed to have been possessed by the 31,100 per- 
sons in 1890, would have grown to much more than double that 
amount by the beginning of 1907. 

But we have added many more names to the possessors of 
great wealth ; and the growth of these enormous fortunes is not 
limited by any ordinary interest rate. 

Railway construction, to which very many of these great 
fortunes were due, has continued unabated; while the develop- 
ment of our street railways, gas and electric lighting, telephone 
systems, and the like, had only begun seventeen years ago. The 
vast growth of our cities with their added land values, and the 
development of our oil, coal, iron, gold, copper, and other mineral 
resources, have continued to pile up these great fortunes more 

♦Thomas G. Shearman. Forum, November, 1889. 



A HALF CENTURY OF WEALTH CONCENTRATION 5 

rapidly than ever before. The reorganization of our railroads — 
almost universally foreclosed during the decade of 1900 — as also 
their constant recapitalization, have, even more than their origi- 
nal construction, afforded again the greatest opportunities for 
rapid fortune building. And especially trust formation, perhaps 
more than any other invention devised by man, has been calcu- 
lated to take wealth from the people at large, and add this to 
the great fortunes of the world. 

It is popularly supposed, it is true, that the proportion of our 
national wealth owned by the "wealthy" class, is something like 
fifty per cent.; and, curiously enough, this supposition is based 
upon the computations of Dr. Chas. B. Spahr, Geo. K. Holmes of 
the United States Census Bureau, and others, made almost coin- 
cident with the compilation mentioned by Senator Ingalls. 

Dr. Spahr, basing his computations upon the returns of the 
surrogate courts of the State of New York, for the years 1889, 
1890, and 1891, estimated* that one per cent, of the popula- 
tion of the United States then owned fifty-one per cent, of the 
wealth of the nation; while Mr. Holmes, basing his estimates upon 
an analysis of the United States Census returns for i890,estimatedf 
that three one-hundredths of one per cent, of the population then 
owned twenty per cent, of the wealth of the nation; which esti- 
mate, if extended to cover a full one per cent, of our population, 
would probably give practically the same results as that of Dr. 
Spahr. 

These, as also other authorities, show a substantial agree- 
ment upon the part of statisticians, that one per cent., or less 
than one per cent., of our population owned, in 1890, practically 
half the wealth of the nation. 

But whether we hold with Senator Ingalls, that 31,100 per- 
sons possessed at that date fifty-six per cent, of the nation's 
wealth; or, on the other hand, with Dr. Spahr, Mr. Holmes, and 
others, that one per cent, of our then population, owned fifty per 
cent, of that wealth; — is, after all, a matter of little moment, and 
can httle affect any conclusions we may reach. That these same 
figures, based upon the statistics of seventeen years ago, should 
however, be now cited, as showing the degree of wealth concen- 
tration to-day, is a matter of considerable importance. It merely 
illustrates the reluctance to break away from any given estimate 
once established. 

Yet the merest glance will show that, so far from remaining 
stationary, this wealth concentration has proceeded with vastly 
accelerated pace during the last seventeen years. 

The fortune of John D. Rockefeller, for instance, was but 
1 1 00,000,000 in 1889; while his present income alone is estimatedtt 

*See Arena, Vol. 18, Page 289. i Political Science Quarterly, Dec, 1893. 
' ttThe New York Commercial, January — , 1905. 



6 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

at from $72,000,000 to $100,000,000 per year. Now, inasmuch as 
it requires all the labor of all the people to add a bare $3,000,000,- 
000 — or less than three per cent, per annum — to our national 
wealth of some $106,000,000,000, that gentleman's wealth, judged 
by its earning power, cannot by any species of computation be 
placed to-day at less than from $2,500,000,000 to $3,000,000,- 
000. If he receives one-fortieth part of the national income, 
then he is, to all intents and for all purposes, possessed of one- 
fortieth part of the nation's capital. 

But, if John D. Rockefeller's wealth has increased, during the 
past seventeen years, from a paltry $100,000,000 to $2,500,000,- 
000, then the $40,000,000, given as the wealth of Wm. Rockefeller 
in 1889, must have increased to $1,000,000,000; and the fortunes 
of H. H. Rogers, H. M. Flagler, John Archbold, O. M. Payne, and 
other hangers-on of the Rockefeller chariot wheels, must have 
grown proportionately; and the estimate recently made by the 
Hon. Frank S. Monett, of Ohio, and widely quoted by the asso- 
ciated press, of some $10,000,000,000 — or nearly the one-tenth 
part of our entire national wealth — as the possessions of that 
inner circle known as the ''Standard Oil Group," would seem to 
be sufficiently conservative. 

Similarly the wealth of the Astor family, which had grown 
from $6,000,000 to $300,000,000 in the thirty-five years from 1854 
to 1889, cannot, in the seventeen years since then, be supposed 
to have grown to less than $1,000,000,000. So also the wealth 
of the Vanderbilt family, which had grown from a paltry $1,- 
500,000 in 1854 to $300,000,000 in 1889, can hardly to-day be 
less than $1,000,000,000. The fortunes, moreover, of Mr. Car- 
negie, Clark of Montana, or the Gould family, must range some- 
where from $500,000,000 to $1,000,000,000 each. And at least 
in the quarter-billion would range the accumulations of such mas- 
ter minds in the realm of high-fmance as J. Pierpont Morgan, A. 
Belmont, E. H. Harriman, Marshall Field, James J. Hill, and 
others equally well known. While just below these are hun- 
drens of others, whose single fortunes, now lost in the more gigan- 
tic aggregations, equal and perhaps exceed the largest fortunes 
in the country seventeen years ago. 

A careful analysis of the census for 1900 shows* that, as clas- 
sified according to occupations, 250,251 persons possessed $67,- 
000,000,000 out of a total of $95,000,000,000 given as our then 
national wealth; 8,429,845 persons possessed $24,000,000,000; 
while the remainder of "occupied" persons, some 20,393,137 
in number, possessed but $4,000,000,000. 

But this arrangement by occupations is, to say the least, 
incomplete in arriving at any estimate of wealth concentration. 
Of the working population, as also of the so-called " middle 

*See Socialist Poster, No. i, by Lucien Sanial. 



A HALF CENTURY OF WEALTH CONCENTRATION 7 

classes," it is true that the occupied persons usually represent 
the ownership of wealth, and an arrangement by occupations, 
or famihes, is therefore approximately just. In the "wealthy 
class," however, not only the heads of families, but their wives, 
their infants, as also all other unoccupied persons, are the possessors 
of wealth, through inheritance, through gift, or otherwise. So 
that the 250,251 names of this class, here given, cannot be said 
to represent that many families, but instead so many individuals 
out of a total population of some 76,000,000. 

Reduced to percentages, this would therefore show three- 
tenths of one per cent, of our population as possessing seventy-one 
per cent, of the nation's wealth m 1900; a vast increase, as will be 
seen, over the showing for 1 890, and furnishing a striking indica- 
tion of what we are to expect in this year of our Lord, 1907. 

If, then, we increase this list of 250,251 names to, say 800,000 
names — or one per cent, of our population — this would probably 
include all in inaependent circumstances as well as the enormously 
rich; and it would apparently be an underestimate, rather than 
an overestimate, to place their present combined possessions at 
an increase of forty per cent, over the showing for 1890, and twenty 
per cent, over the showing for 1900; or, in other words, at ninety 
per cent, of the total aggregate wealth of the country to-day, 
estimated at $106,000,000,000. 

These conclusions are startling, it must be admitted; and 
they are, of course, from the very nature of the problem, inca- 
pable of exact verification. They are, however, certainly borne 
out by this comparison of the census of 1900 with the showing 
of wealth concentration at previous periods. Nor yet are they 
so startling, or so incredible, as the known increase of individual 
fortunes. If John D. Rockefeller alone owns to-day the one- 
fortieth part of all the nation's wealth; and if the immediate 
group of which he is the central figure, called "The Standard Oil 
Group," is possessed of nearly one-tenth part of all that wealth; 
then it is hardly conceivable that the thousands, and tens of thou- 
sands, of other names of enormous wealth, by whom they are sur- 
rounded, are possessed of less than the proportion named. 

The Steel Trust, for instance, has added its dozens of names 
of greatest wealth to our roll of multi-millionaires; the Copper 
Trust, and now the Beef Trust, have added their full quota; while 
there are some seven hundred other trusts, together with bank- 
ing, insurance, railroad, and other public service, corporations 
innumerable, all piling up their silent, relentless billions for their 
proud owners. 

It was only recently that a man by the name of Harkness 
died in Pittsburg, and another by the name of Lockhart, I be- 
Heve, in Philadelphia, whose names were practically unknown 
to the general public, and yet the fortune of each of them 



8 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

was reliably given at from 1150,000,000 to |i ^5,000,000; or 
yet another by the name of Weyerhauser, *a citizen of a west- 
ern town, altogether unknown, is declared to have "cornered" 
the timber of the country, as Rockefeller has "cornered" its oil, 
counting his wealth almost into the billions as a result. And 
scarcely a week passes that we do not hear of some man, woman, 
or even child, all but unknown, and yet whose fortunes are vari- 
ously given at from $50,000,000 to $100,000,000, or even more. 
Truly, with the tormented one of old, industrial society must 
to-day exclaim, "Our name is legion!" 

THE GROWING POVERTY OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 

But it is contended that, notwithstanding these enormous 
fortunes, the benefits of our national prosperity are fairly dis- 
tributed; and, along with glowing pictures of our achievements, 
reference is made to the "comfortable homes," the "well stocked 
markets and shops," the "superior methods of education," as 
well as other increased comforts of civilization, now enjoyed even 
by the poorer classes. 

These great fortunes are pictured as a disguised blessing; and 
the toilers of the world are assured that they are benefitted by 
existing conditions equally with the enormously rich. 

In proof of this contention we are informed f that our savings 
bank deposits averaged 1 16.72 per capita in 1900, as against a 
showing of but I4.75 per capita in i860: and, moreover, that the 
wages paid the 18,000,000 wage receivers in the United States, in 
1900, averaged not less than I400 per annum; showing "that, from 
the annual accumulation of wealth in the country a large share 
is distributed to those who are wage earners." 

Our savings bank deposits will, however, be found to belong 
very largely to other classes besides the "working population." 

But even were they the fortunate possessors of every dollar ot 
these deposits, yet a credit of I16.72 in the Savings Bank can 
hardly be said to place the workingman in the same class with 
the growing rich. And while it is true that our savings bank 
deposits have grown since i860, this is but because savings banks 
were not then so common as now, and our population was more 
largely rural. Both from habit and situation, our frugal-minded 
ancestors were much more likely to keep their savings each in 
his strong box at home, than go in search of such institutions. 

Besides, fifty years ago the lines between wealth and poverty 
and capital and labor, had as yet scarcely been drawn. 

The toilers of the world were farmers and mechanics, pursuing 

*Cosmopolitan Magazine, December, 1906. 

r "Concentration of Wealth," by Carroll D.Wright, The Independent,^ 
May I, 1902. 



GROWING POVERTY OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY q 

their independent vocations; and owning their farms, shops, 
and places of business, and usually their homes. To-day they 
are, for the most part, in the employ of great corporations 
*' depending entirely upon wages paid/' They have no shops, 
nor places of business, and nearly two-thirds of them are home- 
less, the tenants of the rich ; while the homes of thirty-three per 
cent, of the remaining one-third are mortgaged.* Many of them 
are compelled to go into debt, against the coming pay-day, for 
the very necessaries of life; and in case of sickness or the loss of 
employment fall inevitably behind. 

To say, then, that they have a few dollars standing to their 
credit in the savings bank, is not to prove that they are becom- 
ing rich, or even forehanded; but merely illustrates the desperate 
desire of men with nothing, to have a few dollars laid away with 
which to keep their families from starving in case of sickness or 
the loss of employment; and this although their very household 
goods may be under mortgage, and their debts remain unpaid. 

Nor yet does the average annual wage of I400, paid to the 
18,000,000 wage receivers in the United States, show the posses- 
sion of wealth in our "working population." 

The wages paid the workingmen are a necessary charge upon 
wealth productton; and form no part of the wealth accumulation. 
They do not, then, show "that from the annual accumulation of 
wealth in this country, a large share is distributed to those who 
are wage earners.'' So long as human labor continues to be 
necessary to wealth production, it stands the owners of wealth 
to set aside a sufficient sum to maintain the laborers in their 
employ, just as they must repair and renew the machines in 
their service. 

And more than this bare provision, the laborer has long since 
ceased to expect. Our economists have long preached the doc- 
trine that,— "The wages of labor are determined by the amount 
required to support the life of the laborer, for the simple reason 
that he cannot accept less"; and no sensible, well-ordered body 
of workingmen, even in the heat of the most sanguinary strike, 
would dream of asking more, or of laying any claim to the vast 
accumulations of their employers. 

If, then, they make any complaint, and risk loss of employment, 
and starvation even, in enforcing their complaints by strikes, 
this is but because they find that the boasted economic law, which 
is said to assure them a living wage, is now ruled out by monopoly; 
and that, what with the increased cost of living due to monopoly 
in its various forms, the I400 average annual wage dictated to 
them is insufficient upon which to support life. Only by means 
of credit are many of them, in fact, enabled to get along at all. 
Their wages are ordinarily consumed in advance for the week's 
' *U. S. Census, 1900. 



lo THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

expenses; and many of them are in arrears for months to their 
tradesmen and other sources. Should they then lose their em- 
ployment, or their creditors pursue them, they are in danger of 
being turned into the streets, and of suffering for the commonest 
necessaries of life. 

And practically the same condition holds of the 6,000,000 
farmers of the country. They too fmd that — what with the price 
of all their products reduced by extortionate charges on their 
way to the markets, and by speculators and trusts when they 
reach the markets, and what with the increased cost of living due 
to the same sources — they have latterly been falling behind, 
rather than advancing in the possession of wealth. 

The census returns show that the average value per farm of 
all the farm property in the United States — including the land, 
improvements, stock and implements — was less by I300 in 1900, 
than forty years before in i860. 

And yet the mortgaged farm was then the exception; now 
we almost say it is the rule. In the single decade from 1880 to 
1890, the farm mortgages of the country increased over seventy 
per cent., while the increase in the number of farms was only 
about twelve per cent., and the value of farm property, per farm, 
diminished during the decade. Our census for 1900 is inexcus- 
ably silent upon this important subject; and we have no means 
of knowing what has been the increase in farm mortgages since 
then. 

This much, however, we learn,* — that in 1900 more than one- 
third of all the farmers of the country were tenants; while of the 
remaining two-thirds the farms of nearly one-third were mort- 
gaged. And, strange to say, the showing is worst in the great 
agricultural states of the north and west. In Iowa only thirty-one 
per cent, of the farms are owned free, in Illinois thirty-six per 
cent., Nebraska thirty-five per cent., Indian Territory twenty-five 
per cent., Kansas thirty-six per cent., Texas thirty-eight percent., 
New York forty-one per cent., and so on throughout the list; — 
all the remainder of the farms being either hired or mortgaged. 

If, now, to this mortgage indebtedness upon their farms, we 
add the mortgage indebtedness upon their stock, their crops, and 
even their farming implements, and household goods, and their 
indebtedness to banks, tradesmen, and other sources, we shall 
find no reason to class the farmers of the country with our billion- 
aires and others of the growing rich. On the contrary, in the 
east and south the farmers have latterly been compelled to desert 
their farms by the thousands; while in the fertile north and west 
the foreclosure of the mortgages upon their farms has driven other 
hundreds of thousands into the ranks of mere tenants, or worse 
still into the lowest ranks of wage earners. 

*U. S. Census, 1900. 



GROWING POVERTY OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY ii 

" It is, indeed, because they are unable, with all their eflForts, to 
make any headway, that we have witnessed the Farmers' 
Alliance, Grange, Populist, and other like agitation, of recent years. 
But the 18,000,000 wage earners and the 6,000,000 farmers, 
with their families, comprise nine-tenths of our entire population; 
and their condition is necessarily shared by the petty tradesmen, 
shopkeepers, professional men, and others, who constitute per- 
haps nine-tenths of the remaining one-tenth of our population. 
These depend for their sustenance upon the great producing 
classes, and must share in their indigence as well. 

Nine-tenths of all our business men are failures, so far as the 
accumulation of wealth is concerned. And fully that per cent, 
of our professional men never become anything else but failures 
under these conditions. The average annual salary of all the 
ministers of the country is estimated at between I500 and |6oo; 
and, excluding the small number of wealthy parishes, the average 
for the vast majority at between I400 and $500. This upon 
which to support their families in these days of trust prices, 
satisfy their expected charities, and sustain the dignity of their 
positions ! The average for the educators of the land would be 
even lower. And, if allowance be made for uncollectable ac- 
counts, the showing for the vast majority of lawyers and physi- 
cians would probably be little, if any, better. 

Only those, in fact, who are so fortunate as to enter the 
service of the rich, can afford to wear their costly livery, and 
eat of the lavish crumbs which fall from their table. For the vast 
majority there remains nothing but a constant grinding struggle 
to make "ends meet"; and many are compelled to give over the 
struggle at last, to accept the more certain, if still beggarly, 
stipend of mere wage earners. 

It is vain, then, and idle, to talk of the increased comforts of 
our civilization ; as if riding in street cars, and talking through 
telephones, were any compensation for the lack of bread, the fear 
of want, and the shames now put upon labor. It is useless, too, 
to say that the laborer is not now as thrifty as formerly; for he 
is compelled to stint on every hand in order but to be able to live. 
A man is not in much of a mood to squander, when his wife and 
children are in need of the common necessaries of life, and on the 
morrow may be in actual want. Or, if occasionally driven into 
spendthrift habits, this is but the recklessness of despair; like 
the suicide flinging away an existence that seems hardly worth 
the keeping. 

Equally wide and irrelevant of the question, is the assertion, 

so often insisted upon, of the benefits conferred upon all by the 

so-called ** organization of industry," and the present industrial 

regime. 

- It were better to have postponed, or even to have entirely 



12 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

foregone, these benefits, if they but result in deprivation and hard- 
ship to the great mass of mankind. "Greater is he that ruleth 
himself, than he that taketh a city;" and our conquest and in- 
vasion of the world's markets might well have been postponed, 
until we should have learned how to so govern our relations 
among ourselves, as to make these achievements a blessing 
rather than a curse. 

Nor can we listen to any comparison of the "wages of super- 
intendence," the ''dividends to capital," and the "wages paid 
labor," as showing a fair division between labor and capital. 
When the toilers see these vast millions, and even billions, 
amassed from their toil; and contrast these fortunes with their 
own impoverished and desperate condition; — they know that 
somewhere, and somehow, there is a missing factor, a hidden 
legerdemain, by which their earnings have been swept from 
them as surely as the professional gambler sweeps into his pocket 
the money of his victims. 

We are, in fact, a nation of debtors. It was said of old, "All 
roads lead to Rome;" and although we have to-day broad acres 
and many towns, the shadow of Wall Street rests upon all, and 
to Wall Street flows by inevitable operation all the wealth we 
produce. 

The census of 1890 gave the quasi-public corporation debt of 
the country as 15,000,000,000, the real estate indebtedness of 
private corporations and individuals as $6,000,000,000 other items 
of private indebtedness, 1 5, 000,000,000 ; while the national, and 
other pubhc, indebtedness aggregated 12,027,170,546; making a 
grand total of 118,027,170,546; or nearly one-third of the then 
aggregate wealth of the nation. 

The census of 1900 is again reprehensibly silent upon this 
important subject. But, assuming that our indebtedness has 
grown only in the same proportion as our wealth itself has grown, 
it would yet be something like $30,000,000,000, or about I375 
per capita of our population ; in other words, about thirteen times 
as great as our per capita money circulation, and twenty-three 
times as great as our savings bank deposits. 

The money circulation may, indeed, be anywhere but in the 
hands of the people; and the savings bank deposits belong to 
others than the toilers; but the debt burden we may be sure is 
every dollar of it borne by them. We have all laughed at the 
simplicity of the countryman, who thought to lighten the burden 
of the beast he was riding, by placing the bag of grain upon his 
own shoulders, himself riding the while; and we cannot our- 
selves be so simple as to think that the public or corporate debt 
is any less borne by us than our own more humble obligations. 
Upon the back of that great and simple brute, called "Industrial 
Society," are all these riders and their burdens borne. 



GROWING POVERTY OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY 13 

But the stocks of our railway, trust, and other corporations, 
are expected to draw dividends; and constitute as truly a debt 
upon the part of the public to the owners of wealth, as do mort- 
gages and bonds themselves. And these under their present enor- 
mous overcapitalization, would perhaps double our debt burden; 
the whole constituting a lien, equivalent to a first mortgage, not 
only upon the industry, but also upon the property of every citi- 
zen ; with the power given these corporations to levy a tax there- 
upon, as extortionate m extent as were that debt burden to exceed, 
in fact, all the actual tangible wealth of the nation. 

And yet we are comfortably assured, that because there are 
so many farmers and wage earners owning farms and homes, or 
other forms of wealth, free of incumbrance, we have, therefore, 
nothing to fear from the concentration of wealth! 

On the contrary no estimate, as to wealth concentration, can 
approximate to anything like the truth, without taking into 
account the enormous overcapitalization of our public service 
and other corporations. So far as the public is concerned the 
payment of dividends upon these stocks diflfers only in name from 
the payment of interest upon mortgages. Equally so it is a matter 
of profound indifference to the individual farmer or home owner 
whetrfier the mortgage or other incumbrance, upon which he 
pays interest, rests upon his property singly, or in common 
with the property of others. 

It is not, indeed, because of their tracks or rolHng stock, that 
our railways are enabled to capitalize their properties at three, 
or even five, times their actual worth, and dispose of these 
"securities" to the pubhc. It is, instead, because of their fran- 
chises and privileges as common carriers; and these franchises 
and privileges as John Stuart Mill long ago pointed out * are 
nothing, if not the power to tax the public — to tax the industry 
and property of the nation. 

The excess of capitalization of these corporations over and 
above the actual cost or worth of their properties, thus operates 
as a "blanket" mortgage upon all the property of the people, 
with nothing to sustain it but this taxing power. And precisely 
the same considerations apply to the trusts, and other corporations 
possessing monopoly, or taxing, powers. 

But so enormous, and so iniquitous, is the overcapitalization 
of these corporations that this overcapitalization alone would 
probably exceed the value of all the farm property in the country, 
or the " equities " and other possessions of the farmers, over and 
above their debts and mortgages, added to the meager posses- 
sions of all our wage earners. Not, therefore, until this incum- 
brance is " lifted," can the farmer be said in any true sense to 
own his farm, or the wage earner his home. And not until then 
* "Political Economy." Book V., Chap. II., Page 11. 



14 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

can any enumeration of wealth, as being "popularly owned" be 
considered at all conclusive upon the subject of wealth concen- 
tration. 

It is, however, asserted that these corporations render valuable 
services; and that the charges they make are but a return for 
such services, of which there can be no cause for complaint. 

Not so. If I employ a servant upon a free and equal agreement 
as to what his services are worth, then is the wage he receives 
justly and fairly a return for the service rendered. But if, now, I 
have given that servant possession of my kitchen, or my home, with 
the power to control for his own profit the price of all the supplies 
of my table, and the very entrance or exit to my home, or refuse 
me altogether such supplies or service, then is he no longer my 
servant, but my absolute master. I must still live; and if he 
thus controls the means and avenues of my labor and living, then 
is he the master of my toil, of my property, and scarcely, indeed, 
can I call my body my own. 

It is precisely such control that these corporations have 
usurped over every field of labor, over all the supplies of living, 
and over all public services. And the charges they extort, by 
virtue of such control, not only pay for the services — which not 
they but their employees rendfer — but has enabled them as well 
to amass their Uncounted billions. To say, then, that these 
charges, in all their enormity, are but a just return for services 
rendered, is but to drivel — to talk the language of utter nonsense. 

Hardly, indeed, except by scant courtesy, can we be said to 
any longer have a ''middle class " The independent manufacturer, 
merchant, or other employer of labor, is rapidly being absorbed 
or routed by the trusts and other corporations; only the petty 
tradesmen, shopkeepers, and the like, remaining as the mere 
purveyors or distributors for these gigantic combinations. 

But if the independent employers of labor, are being thus 
eliminated from the ranks of our so-called "middle class;" then 
surely the farmer or wage-earner cannot be said, under existing 
circumstances, to belong to that class. Professor Walker — than 
whom there is no higher authority — has stated* that, deducting 
rents and interest, the income of the farmers of the country is 
less than the average income even of the wage earners. 

The tax levied by these corporations rests a burden upon the 
farmer's property and toil, in the shape of excessive transpor- 
tation rates, the reduced price received for his products, as well 
as in the increased cost of all his supplies; while upon the 
wage earner it bears not less heavily in the beggarly wage 
dictated to him, as well as in the extortionate cost of his living. 
It but remains, then, for the farmer and wage-earner to fully 
comprehend the nature of this tax, in its direct and inevitable 

*See " The American Farmer," by A. M Simons. 



A REIGN OF CORRUPTION AND PLUNDER 15 

bearing upon the labor and living of each, when they will at 
last realize that their interests are one; that they are alike the 
victims of a common foe. Then, too, will they awake to the 
necessity of united action. 

Probably the one-thousandth part of our population can be 
said to be enormously rich; perhaps the one-twentieth part in 
comfortable circumstances; while all the remainder, constitut- 
ing fully ninety-five per cent, of the whole, cannot be said to live 
other than a precarious existence; compelled to depend upon their 
day's labor for life itself, and if the right to toil be denied them, 
brought face to face with actual want. A sad spectacle this, 
under any circumstances. Viewed in connection with our enor- 
mous wealth production, and the billionaire fortunes of the day, 
it is an infamous spectacle! 



A REIGN OF CORRUPTION AND PLUNDER 

Surely it is worth our while to inquire how a power so vast, 
and which means so much to industrial society, has been acquired. 
If these enormous fortunes have been honestly earned, and are 
the rightful property of their possessors, then must the world of 
toil beneath submit as best it can. But, at least, when these pos- 
sessions and this power involve the well being, and even the lives, 
of the struggling masses, those whose dearest and most vital in- 
terests are at stake may be excused if they inquire how the pos- 
sessions and the power of these lords of the industrial world have 
been obtained. 

These millions tell, in fact, no honest tale. If a vagrant, with 
no visible means of support, is found in possession of valuable 
treasure, he is arrested on suspicion; the presumption being that 
he could not have earned it, and hence must have appropriated 
it from others. 

Similarly, when single individuals are found in possession of 
hundreds of millions, and even billions of dollars, the suspicion 
attaches that so much wealth could not have been honestly earned. 
The wage earner, whose income averages, as we are told, some 
I400, and who counts himself fortunate if he is able to lay by 
that sum in the course of a life time, as also the farmer, whose 
toil and that of his entire family scarce suffices at the year's end 
to meet his expenses much less to pay off the mortgage upon his 
farm or permit him to lay by anything, cannot believe that a 
single individual in this land has actually " earned '* a billion dol- 
lars in the course of a short generation; nor yet that there exists 
tens of thousands of other individuals in this republic, the aver- 
age "earnings'' of each of whom equal the combined possessions 
of a full hundred thousand of the sons of toil. 



li THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

But if these fortunes have not been earned, then the conclu- 
sion is irresistible that they have been, as in the other case, appro- 
priated, f 

The toilers of the world may not, indeed, see by what means 
this is done; and it is, perhaps, not to be expected thait they 
should. If the midnight burglar, or sneak-thief, would filch our 
belongings, he does it secretly, and does not advertise his methods. 
And it can hardly be expected that their more ambitious rivals 
should pursue tactics any more honest or open, when proposing 
to relieve the public of all its earnings and possessions. But that 
they have succeeded in doing this, and beyond all proportion to 
the pictured "wages of superintendence," or "just dividends to 
capital," their heaped-up billions show. And when the people 
see these, and realize too their own meager returns from all our 
boasted prosperity, they can but conclude that, as in the other 
case, their loss has been brought about by secret, dark, and mid- 
night methods. ^ 

Our multi-millionaires are, it is true, fond of pointing to the 
honest toil by which their first savings were earned, as evidence 
of a blameless career. 

So also, could many inhabitants of our jails point with pride 
to the innocence of their early manhood. But we know that 
when their careers of crime began, they took to other occupations. 
Even so, when these men of enormous wealth began piling up 
their millions, it was by far other means than their first dollars were 
earned. It was by seizing upon some necessity of life of a nation, 
or even of the whole of industrial society, and compelling the 
world of toil and living to come to them, and accept their terms 
of absolute dictation, that their wealth grew to these monstrous 
proportions. Through the exploitation of land and mineral re- 
sources, or of railways, money, and other public utilities, as well 
as of industry — by railway, banking, trust, and other corpora- 
tions — have these millions, and even billions, grown to their 
present proportions. 

These fortunes first began to mount up with the development 
of our railways and other public utilities such as telegraphs, tele- 
phones, street railways, gas and electric lighting, and the like. 

Such concerns are public necessities, without which modern 
industry and living would be practically impossible. Yet our 
policy from the beginning has been to turn all these highways 
over to private corporations for their profit; and these corpora- 
tions proceeded at once to corrupt Congress, state legislatures^ 
and even county and city officials, thereby to reap larger gains. 
It is related* that when a group of New York capitalists were 
bidding for the street railways of Toronto, Canada, they laughed 
at the idea of paying any part of the earnings to the city. 

*W. S. Gregory, in the Outlook, Feb. s, 1898. 



A REIGN OF CORRUPTION AND PLUNDER 17 

** They had been accustomed " (so they informed one of the 
committee) "to pay something to the aldermen, but nothing to 
the municipaHty/' And that this practice has been almost uni- 
versal, recent investigations and exposures have only too clearly 
shown. 

These corporations have, in fact, had their paid lobbyists in 
every law-making body; and have spent of their money freely 
in obtaining their franchises and special privileges, as well as 
enormous land and money grants, from the general government, 
and from the various states, counties, towns and villages, in which 
these properties were situated, or through which they passed; 
often more than sufficient in the aggregate to pay for their entire 
construction and equipment. 

Yet the roads and other properties, when built, were capitalized 
and bonded generally far in excess of their actual worth; all the 
aids, as well as other proceeds, having gone into the pockets of 
these financiers as their profits. The result was that the public 
was left in every instance an excessively debt burdened road to 
support ; and charges were extortionate as a matter of course, and 
for the same reason the service uniformly wretched. If our rail- 
way and other corporation promoters accumulated their hundreds 
of millions almost in a day, the pubHc alone bore the burden, 
in fraudulently obtained grants and franchises, in extortionate 
charges, inefficient service, and the oppression of labor. 

This same process of overcapitalization was repeated, in per- 
haps a yet more aggravated form, in the organization of the trusts. 
So great was the greed of the principal owners and organizers to 
obtain the highest prices, and reap the largest profits, that prac- 
tically all of the trusts are to-day overcapitalized, often twice, 
thrice, and even five times, the real worth of their properties; 
with the inevitable result that trust prices, and other dealings 
with the public, are extortionate to the last degree. 

By these, and other like means and methods, are all the earn- 
ings and savings of the people being swept into the pockets of 
the gigantic gamblers who deal the hands, and play the cards, 
(and mark them as well), in our great national confidence game 
of Wall Street. 

Little matters it, indeed, to the farmers to be told that their 
crops give promise of untold wealth, when they know that the 
railway, trust, and other corporations, have tlie power to rob 
them of every dollar of profits, through transportation rates, ele- 
vator charges, packing house extortions, and the control of prices 
by speculators and trusts. Little matters it to the wage-earner 
to be told of the increased power of his labor to produce wealth, 
when he knows that in all this increased wealth production he 
has no share; but must sell his labor, as any other commodity, 
to the owners of the corporations, who stand between him and 



18 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

the wealth he creates, with the power to dictate the terms upon 
which he shall toil, or turn him altogether away from the right 
to labor, and with it from the very right to live. Little matters 
it, again, to the whole body of society, whether as producers or 
consumers, to be told of our enormous wealth production, or of 
the boasted supremacy of this nation in the markets of the world ; 
when they know that between them and the use or enjoyment 
of this wealth stand the trusts, transportation, and other cor- 
porations, with the power to tax them, even to the starvation 
point, upon all the products of labor and supplies of life. 

Nor m this brief survey of the means by which these vast and 
countless fortunes have been amassed, can we afford to overlook 
the control and distribution of money, by banks and other finan- 
cial institutions. 

Money is, not less than our great pubHc highways themselves, 
a public necessity of the most vital nature. It is alike the meas- 
ure of value, and medium of exchange. The merchant's coun- 
ters may be filled with goods, the farmer's granaries may be 
full to bursting, and labor stand anxious to barter its services for 
these supplies. But, while each has what the other needs and 
must have, simple barter is impossible. Labor must be paid in 
money; the farmer must receive money for his products, the 
merchant must receive money for his goods. With money alone 
can each in turn satisfy his creditors ; with money alone can each 
purchase the wherewithal to satisfy his wants. 

Appreciating this, its public and vital nature, all governments 
issue money. But its distribution, like the control of our public 
highways, we have given over to the private corporation ; which 
thus stands between the public and the use of money. 

These corporations are, however, organized solely for the profit 
of their owners; and hence it is that although the money after 
its issue^is distributed to the banks at a nominal rate of interest 
— usually from one-fourth to one-half of one per cent.—the banks 
in turn charge borrowers, for the use of the vety same funds, 
rates varying from six to ten per cent., and even higher; prac- 
tically the whole charge constituting their profit for the mere dis- 
tribution — a tax upon the labor and industry of the people. 
But the banks are provided for the care and distribution of pri- 
vate funds as well ; and by far the larger part of the money that 
passes through their hands belongs to depositors, upon which, 
as a rule, they pay no interest. These same funds, however, they 
again distribute in loans and discounts, charging the same rates 
as before; the whole charge constituting, again, their profit for 
the mere distribution — an enormous and perpetual tax upon the 
labor and living of the public. 

If, then, our money circulation is practically free of interest 
when it passes under the control of our banking institutions^ while 



A REIGN OF CORRUPTION AND PLUNDER 19 

burdened with these excessive interest charges, when distributed 
by them to the pubHc, then is the conclusion unmistakable that 
our banking system is responsible for our present exorbitant 
interest rates with all that these mean to industry and living. 

The rates charged by these institutions govern, moreover, 
the rates for private loans as well; and practically the whole 
burden of usury is thus at their doors. Add to this their misuse 
of their position and power in bringing about industrial crises and 
panics, through the withholding of the money supply when most 
needed, but to further the aims of our high-fmanciers; and the 
constant failure of these institutions through the misconduct and 
crimes of their officials, with all the loss and ruin this involves 
not only to depositors and stockholders but to general business 
as well; — and it can be seen how enormous must be the fortunes 
amassed by these means, and how iniquitous and oppressive is 
its exercise upon the labor and living of the whole of industrial 
society. 

Yet another of the means by which these great and numerous 
fortunes have been amassed, is through the exploitation of land. 

Land is the most general, the most universal, of public utili- 
ties. It is the source of all subsistence. From it is drawn, or 
with it is included, the air we breathe, the water we drink, all 
food, and, indeed, every article of convenience and use. Without 
land, man has no place, nor the wherewithal, to live or toil. The 
Son of Man, a wanderer upon the face of the earth, but voiced the 
plaint of the landless in every age, when he cried, — "The foxes 
have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of 
Man hath not where to lay his head." Hence it is, and because of 
its vital use and necessity to society and to its every citizen, that 
when it is permitted, to any, to seize either upon the soil itself or 
its mineral resources for the purpose of withholding these from 
use, thereby to extort money, whether for rent or purchase, vast 
wealth is necessarily amassed therefrom. 

Especially is this power felt, and this iniquitous profit realized, 
in our great metropolitan cities. As the populations of these 
expand, the necessity for the use of the land becomes multiplied 
a thousand fold; and the speculator has the whole population in 
a state of siege, as it were, and is in a position to extort what 
terms he pleases; and his terms must be paid or industry be at 
a standstill, and living impossible. Nor is this tax he levies a 
burden upon the immediate user alone, but upon the population 
of the whole country as well, in the added cost of all supplies and 
reduced price of all products manufactured or distributed in or 
through these great centers of industry and commerce. 

And along with this exploitation of the land, goes also the 
exploitation of all the timber, and minerals, and other like re- 
sources of the country. 



20 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

The mines of the world, and especiall)^ of the precious metals, 
or those in universal use such as steel, oil, copper, coal, and the 
like, are even more than the land itself Hmited in supply; and 
when these are in the possession of a few individuals, possessing 
monopoly powers, it is not to be wondered at that the fortunes 
of the Rockefellers, Carnegie, Clark of Montana, and thousands 
of others scarcely less notorious, are to be traced to this source. 
The price fixed is in such case the price of necessity; the public 
must have the product, and must expect to pay the price asked. 
The fortunes of the owners and exploiters of the mines and their 
resources, alone prove how extortionate is that price; how great 
above the cost of production, or what the price would be were 
this exploitation not permitted. 

If, now, to this brief survey of the principal means by which 
the great fortunes of the world have been amassed, and industrial 
society despoiled thereof, we add the further fact and considera- 
tion that these great accumulations are arbitrarily continued 
from generation to generation in the families and descendants 
of their possessors, by our institution of inheritance, we shall have 
a fairly accurate picture of the whole process by which our enor- 
mous and iniquitous wealth concentration during the last half 
century has taken place. 

But whatever the particular source to which these great for- 
tunes, or any of them, may be traced, the one word describes them 
all, and the one principle runs through them all. Plunder is the 
magic wand that has called all these great fortunes into being; 
plunder is the principle, the very god of high-fmance. It was the 
more effectually to accomplish this plunder that these financiers 
corrupted our politics, and defrauded the public of franchises and 
grants. It was the thirst for plunder that impelled them, by every 
devious method, to lure investors to surrender their savings. It 
was the instinct of plunder that prompted them, through the 
agency of the corporation, to seize upon every avenue of labor 
and of living the more surely to compel the whole of industrial 
society to yield to them all of its earnings and possessions. 

If our forefathers, the ablest money-getters among them, were 
compelled to toil a life-time in amassing a modest million or two, 
this was but because they had not yet fully grasped the possibili- 
ties of high-finance. Capitalism was still in its infancy; and they 
had not yet learned the secret of seizing upon some utility, or 
service, or commodity, required by the whole community, or even 
by the whole of industrial society; and compelling every citizen 
to pay any price they chose to dictate, governed by no law of 
competition, nor subject to any check save inordinate greed. 
And if, on the other hand, we tiehold, suddenly rising from no- 
where, these great fortunes shooting up like weeds of the field, 
and spreading over the face of the whole earth, until they have 



A REIGN OF CORRUPTION AND PLUNDER 21 

obscured every other question and concern in life, this was but 
because our financiers suddenly discovered — as Mr. Carnegie 
frankly tells us — that "the only way to get rich is to command 
the toil of others." And they found in the modern corporation 
the means by which they could set the whole of industrial society 
to toil for them on terms harder, more imperative, and altogether 
more profitable, than those imposed by the taskmasters of old 
in the land of Egypt. Can we, then, ask: 

"Upon what meat doth this our Ceasar feed. 
That he hath grown so great?" 

Neither are we left in doubt as to the source from whence 
these fortunes come. According to the reports of the Dun and 
Bradstreet Mercantile Agencies, respectively, the cost of living 
has increased forty-five, or fifty-five, per cent, within nine years; 
this as shown by the records of capitalism, the conclusions 
of cold, unsympathetic bookkeeping. 

These figures take on an added significance, moreover, when 
it is learned* that the wages of labor, so far from showing a cor- 
responding increase, actually diminished seven dollars per work- 
ingman in all manufacturing occupations during the decade of 
1900; while the average wages of all railway employes ** increased 
only four per cent, in the twelve years from 1892 to 1904 — or 
less than one-tenth of the increase in the cost of living. On the 
other hand we findf that the percentage of the employed had 
increased from about one-third of our population in 1880 to nearly 
two-fifths in 1900; the wives and children of the toilers being 
forced into servitude in ever increasing numbers, in order but 
to be able to live. Truly, we serve our masters well! Never 
old world despot demanded of his subjects so much; never 
dumb ox yielded its neck more patiently to the yoke! 

Still the attorney for the Standard Oil Trust informs usff 
that, — "the reason poverty exists is because nature or the devil 
has made some men weak and imbecile, and others lazy and 
worthless; and neither man nor God can do much for one who 
will do nothing for himself." It is just possible, however, that 
men may yet outgrow their moral laziness, and their political 
imbecihty, and decide in the end to help themselves. 

Nor yet have we seen the end. The conditions now so op- 
pressive are still developing, and this pov/er is becoming more 
absolute. Occasionally, indeed, we hear of strife between these 
high-financiers themselves, as in the case of the Northern Securi- 
ties Company, or the Equitable Assurance Society; but this is 

*See abstract Twelfth Census, Page 300, Table 153. 
**Statistics of Railways (Interstate Commerce Com.), 1901 and 1904. 

tTwelfth Census. Special Report, "Occupations." CCXXXVII. 
' ft "The Trust: Its Book," Page 72. 



22 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

only the conflict between robber barons to determine which 
among them shall be supreme chief. And when the smoke 
of battle has cleared away, we can surely expect to see a single 
individual in control of each field, — a Morgan, perhaps, of the 
so-called "industrials," a Harriman or Hill of railways, a Still- 
man of banks, a Ryan of insurance, a Belmont of municipal 
franchises, and so on, each with his lieutenants in various degrees ; 
while supreme over all will tower the one giant Mephistophelean 
figure, labelled "Standard Oil,'* mother of this brood of Horrors, 
master absolute of the labor, the liberty, and the lives of a whole 
nation. 

INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY SOLD INTO BONDAGE 

It is this wide and painful discrepancy between things as they 
should be, and things as they are; it is this increased and increas- 
ing toil, and poverty, and wretchedness, falling to the lot of men 
in the midst of, and in proportion to, the skill and progress whick 
should enrich them, that is at the root of the social and industrial 
discontent now everywhere prevalent. This discontent is seen, 
and even rises into menace, in labor combinations and strikes; 
in the wide spread of SociaHsm, and even of Nihilism; in the mut- 
tered rage and hate of men against their oppressors, and against 
law itself, which they are coming to regard as their foe; in riot, 
bloodshed, and the assassin's knife. 

Men are, and ever have been, slow to break away from the 
old order. They are creatures of habit and custom; and are, 
withal, so absorbed in the struggle but to get a living, that it is 
always most difficult to ^et them to think at all upon these sub- 
jects, and next to impossible to bring them to any agreement for 
change. 

But the grim desperation of their lot, want, and starvation, 
are compelling them at last to think; and this they are now every- 
where doing with terrible distinctness and energy. They are 
asking themselves, and demanding of their rulers in tones of 
thunder to know, where the vast gains of their progress have 
gone; and why when they accomplish so much, and create wealth 
so abundantly, they receive so little, and are plunged more and 
more into the depths of poverty and despair. 

There is a growing conviction in the public mind that these 
conditions are not the conditions of health. Men are coming to 
think that these vast aggregations of capital, with the growing 
power and tyranny they exercise over the industrial world, are 
an evil and a menace to society; and that by reason of them we 
have somehow missed the real fruitage of all our industry and 
progress; that, unable to assimilate these its achievements, in- 
dustrial society is staggering under its success like a drunken 
man; is sick with a surfeit of its very abundance. 



INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY SOLD INTO BONDAGE 23 

It is true the editor of "The Trust: Its Book/' in a burst of 
enthusiasm, tells us* that the trust itself is "a wholesome, irre- 
sistible, natural progression from the lower forms of industrial 
life to higher ones; it is a phase of economic evolution having 
its root at the gate of Eden, controlled by laws as regular as those 
which mould the falling raindrop." While the General Counsel 
of the Standard Oil Trust rises to heights of the most pathetic 
eloquence, and warns usf that; — "To stop co-operation of indi- 
viduals and aggregations of capital — by trust methods of course — 
would be to arrest the wheels of progress, to stay the march of 
civilization, to decree immobility of intellect, and degradation of 
humanity: you might as well endeavor to stay the formation of 
the clouds, the falling of the rains, or the flowmg of the streams, 
as to attempt by any means, or in any manner, to prevent the 
organization of industry, association of persons, and aggregation 
of capital, to any extent that the ever growing trade of the world 
may demand." Truly a grave and awful responsibility rests 
upon those who would question either trust methods, or trust 
hoards ! 

Enormous and iniquitous as are the conditions we have out- 
lined, with all their glaring inequalities and hardships, they will, 
however, be found reducible to a single source and cause. 

When invention and progress made it necessary for men to 
leave their individual workshops or business, and combine to- 
gether in large undertakings, some means of combination must 
be provided ; and in this dilemma we had recourse to the modern 
corporation. When, moreover, the use of steam locomotion, as 
also the extension of our population over an ever widening area, 
called for some means of transportation beyond the primitive 
conveyances of our forefathers, we had recourse again to the cor- 
poration. So, also, when the growth of our cities, and the use 
of street railways, gas, and electric lighting, water supply, and the 
like, called for some united action in the community in order 
properly to provide these services, we had, yet again, recourse 
to the corporation. Or, even farther back, in the very formation 
of our government, when the needs of the people and nation made 
it necessary to provide not only for the issuance, but also for the 
proper distribution of money, "alike to preserve the public credit 
and subserve the growing demands of industry and commerce, 
we had, as ever, recourse to the corporation. Thus were the 
financial, industrial, and public service corporations enthroned 
and established as an integral part of our industrial, social, and 
political systems. 

But the corporation, in its various aspects, it is that has been 
chiefly instrumental in bringing about the conditions we have 

* *,♦ The Trust : Its Book," I ntroduction. 
t " The Trust: Its Book," Page 47. 



24 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

outlined, almost in their entirety; with the single exception of 
the fortunes acquired by land speculation. 

By means of our railway, telegraph, and other like public ser- 
vice corporations, these enormous fortunes first began to pile up 
with such rapidity. By means of street railway, gas, water, elec- 
tric, and telephone corporations in all our cities, the growth of 
yet other of these vast fortunes proceeded apace. By means of 
banks, trust companies, insurance, and like financial corporations, 
other of these fortunes grew to their present enormous bounds. 
By rneans of manufacturing, commercial, mining, and other in- 
dustrial corporations, vast and innumerable other fortunes began 
to develop early in our history; and with the final development 
of these into the trust, mounted to their present colossal propor- 
tions. 

There may have been a few large fortunes accumulated with- 
out the assistance or agency of the coq)oration, but these are 
infinitesimal both in number and extent, and generally will be 
found, indirectly at least, to owe the greater portion of their 
growth to some one of the means mentioned, with, as before 
stated, the single exception of those amassed from land specula- 
tion. And even with regard to these latter, the right application 
of the corporate principle and function to mines and mineral 
resources, as also to the joint use and occupancy of land in cities, 
would, together with the prohibition of non-occupant ownership,, 
have deprived the land question itself of nine-tenths of its enor- 
mity. 

The corporation as at present constituted is, however, itself 
but the creature of law, and natural product of capitalism; and 
resulted from the seizure by capitalism upon the machinery of 
government, even as it already controlled the machinery of pro- 
duction and exchange. 

Given, it is true, the selfish principle as the basis of the com- 
petitive system— with the capitalist domination of industry, and 
of politics as well, to which this necessarily led — and it was 
doubtless inevitable that the corporation should have been 
adopted in its present form. In this sense, indeed, we may 
say that it is the result of '* natural law." But equally so, then, 
can it be said that the tiger's ferocity, or the crkninaPs propen- 
sity is the result of this same "natural law." Yet we destroy the 
one and punish the other; and not until we can say that it is 
man's duty to submit himself to the tiger or the criminal can it 
be argued that "natural law" demands of him to submit himself 
to unjust conditions or institutions. 

This is, indeed, the old doctrine of "divine right" in modern 
garb. We no longer believe in the direct intervention of Deity in 
the affairs of men; but believe instead that Deity works by 
fixed and unchanging laws. This change in the beliefs of men 



INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY SOLD INTO BONDAGE 25 

has, however, necessitated also a change in the arguments of 
those who would exercise rule over them. It would little awe 
men to-day, to be told that Deity had appointed certain of their 
number to rule over them, or had handed down certain institu- 
tions which the)^ must obey. But now, to be told that any ques- 
tion of our institutions is but to set ourselves against ** natural 
law," awakens the nearest resemblance to the old superstition 
of which mankind are at present capable. Hence, we no longer 
hear of "divine right,'* but instead of "natural law," as the war- 
rant for oppressive institutions. The form of expression has 
changed to suit the fashion of the times; the suPperstition, 
and the fraud, remain the same. 

There is, in fact, Httle of divinity either in the nature or the 
origin of the corporation. The attorney for the Standard Oil 
Trust is himself authority for the statement that until quite 
recently the corporation was looked upon as little short of crimi- 
nal. To quote his own words: — *"Less than half a century 
ago, the right of the British people to combine for trading in any 
manner, except as partners, was denied; and the issuing of a 
transferable stock without special legal authority was an illegal 
offence. We brought our laws and customs upon this subject 
from England, and until within a very few years, in most of the 
states of the Union, freedom of combmation was denied." 

Such combination was, in fact, regarded with extreme sus- 
picion by the laws of all lands. It was only allowed for certain 
purposes, and even then a limit was placed upon both the number 
of men and amount of capital that could so unite. There was 
a well grounded suspicion that the combining together in such 
manner of men and capital, placed not only competitors but the 
public at a disadvantage, and was dangerous. The sturdy 
Anglo-Saxon sense of our ancestors revolted at the idea of this 
artificial creature of law, consisting of an unlimited number of 
men and amount of capital controlled by a single head, being 
turned loose in a competitive and warring system, to war upon 
and inevitably crush out all individual effort. 

And if this prejudice has been everywhere ignored, this was 
but because our financiers saw not only the necessity of combi- 
nation to modern business enterprise, but also the precise form 
in which combination would most contribute to their own 
profit. 

The corporation has been, from the first, the creature of 
stock-jobbing, bribery, and every species of corruption. Our 
financiers had their lobbyists in our halls of legislation, and spent 
of their money freely in order to procure both just such laws as 
they desired, and such special privileges and franchises as the 
people had to give. The Credit Mobilier and Star Route scandals 

•" Trusts," S. C. T. Dodd, 1900, Page 37. 



26 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

uncovered early in our railroad building just the methods that 
were resorted to; and the railway historian informs us* that this 
condition was only "typical'* of all our railway legislation. Each 
day additional light is being thrown upon the corruption of our 
municipal, state, and national politics, by the corporations; until 
it must seem, to even the casual reader, that Chaos himself,, 
rather than "natural law", has been instrumental in shaping our 
corporation laws. 

The history of our corporation legislation has been, in fact, 
the blackest page, not only of our politics, but in our record of 
crime itself; and had every petty offender against the peace of 
society, been as successful as these other arch offenders, and like 
them amassed large fortunes, and gone "unwhipt of justice," 
we should doubtless now find them also gravely defending their 
practices, upon the ground that burglary, sneak-thievery, pocket- 
picking, and every other species of common cut-throatism, are 
controlled by "laws as inevitable as those which mould the falling 
raindrop." Such is the inconsistency of human nature; or, 
rather, such is its preverse consistency to see things in the pre- 
cise light that justifies its own selfish ends. 

That the tendency of industrialism has been toward combina- 
tion, may well be admitted. 

The introduction of machinery has, as we have seen, neces- 
sitated men working together rather than separately; while 
improved means of transportation carries this co-operation 
throughout the whole of the industrial world. And this change 
in the industrial order has brought about the increased depend- 
ence of men upon each other. Thousands of toilers now work 
side by side in the world's great factories and mills, to satisfy 
a world-wide demand; thus replacing the old idea of competi- 
tion with that of the combination of human effort — or co-opera- 
tion. 

This industrial movement itself is, indeed, inexorable; and 
may not be changed. But it by no means follows that the laws 
and institutions, with which we have met these conditions, have 
any such quality. The "Industrial movement," so called, is 
one thing, and the human laws or institutions, with which we 
have accommodated ourselves to that movement, are quite an- 
other and different thing. These may be right, or they may be 
Wrong. 

Nor does the mere fact that we have adopted certain laws 
and institutions raise any presumption in their favor; for under 
human institutions, oppression, cruelty, injustice, and wrong 
of every kind have ever sheltered; and it is only as nations have 
from time to time reformed their laws, and righted the abuses 
which have sprung up in human affairs, that they have at all pro- 

*Hudson on Railways. Page 448. 



THE MODERN CORPORATION A MONSTROSITY 27 

gressed, or even continued to exist. And if the very mistakes and 
misconduct, which have brought about oppression and wrong, 
can be said to be the result of natural law, much more, then, the 
moral yearnings, the enlightened self interest, the knowledge 
gleaned from bitter experience, which have enabled men to free 
themselves from that oppression, and right those wrongs, are in 
the truest sense the result of natural law; and constitute, in fact, 
the saving principle of all social and political systems. 

THE MODERN CORPORATION A MONSTROSITY 

We might, indeed, wish to think that our corporation laws 
proceeded from the loftiest motives of patriotism, and are the 
highest product of human wisdom. But we have seen what in- 
fluences went to their enactment; and it will be necessary to 
inquire into their adaptation to present industrial conditions, 
before we can form any judgment as to their wisdom. 

Before the day of machinery, industry was truly competi- 
tive; the law of competition, which had long been the boast of our 
economic system, was in full force and operation. 

The farmer raised his own food products, and the wool, and 
hides, and other material for his clothing and footwear. He 
usually reared his own dwelling, constructed his own furniture, 
and his farming implements, in part, as well. He was his own 
butcher, and often his own tanner; while his good housewife 
spun and wove the material, and made the clothing and linen 
for his household. The family was thus largely self-dependent, 
and self-sustaining. Or, if he required groceries, hardware, drugs, 
implements, and the like, he traded for these with the merchants 
of the village; and the village blacksmith, carpenter, and shoe- 
maker, as well as other artisans, were each glad to furnish him 
their services as required. But whether he sold his products, or 
bartered them for such supplies and services, he was assured fair 
and equal terms. 

The farmers were then, as now, too numerous, and too depen- 
dent upon the sale of their products, to enter into any agreement 
to withhold these from the market; or otherwise attempt to get 
an extortionate price. But if they entered into no conspiracy 
to defeat competition, neither were they the victims of any such 
conspiracy. They found no elevators, packing-houses, nor trans- 
portation systems, to strip them of all their profits on their way 
to the market. Much less were there in those days boards of 
trade, or speculators, trying to "corner" the wheat, corn, or other 
food supply of the nation; in order to dictate prices both to the 
farmers and to all consumers throughout the civilized world. 
Nor yet were there great corporations, or trusts, controlling the 
oil, coal, sugar, and the hundreds of other products of industry 



28 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

and manufacture, which give employment to the world's toilers, 
and go to make up the living of every citizen. 

This, true of the farmer, was equally true of the merchant 
and artisan of the village. There was usually more than one 
merchant in the village, each anxioois to hold the trade of his 
customers; or if there was but one, he was still in competition 
with the merchants of the nearby town, and could not afford to 
be exorbitant in his dealings. So also of the carpenters, and black- 
smiths, and other artisans of the village; they were all competing 
with each other, as well as with their fellow craftsmen in the larger 
towns, and would give their services for a reasonable compensa- 
tion. 

Labor, too, found at that time the widest possible market for 
its commodity. Whether upon the farm, in the store, or in the 
shop, employers were numerous; and fair wages, to satisfy the 
simple wants of the time, assured. 

The wage earner was considered the equal of his employer; 
and if efficient was often taken into partnership; or perhaps 
looked forward to setting up in business for himself. The posi- 
tion was usually filled by young men on their way to independ- 
ence; and no young man could feel it mean or degrading to fill 
positions his employer had filled before him ; and which had been 
filled by a Benjamin Franklin, an Abraham Lincoln, and others 
of the greatest names in American history, in mounting the lad- 
der of wealth or fame. This it was that constituted the dignity 
of labor; and the spirit of equality and freedom it engendered, 
constituted the greatness of our national character, and the hope 
of posterity. The employers were not then, as now, vast cor- 
porations controlled by multi-millionaires, in whose considera- 
tion their employees are rated but as cattle, at their commercial 
value; to be dispensed with as unceremoniously when their ser- 
vices are no longer needed. The old relation was a personal, 
as well as a competitive one; and was inspired by mutual regard, 
as well as by mutual interest, between employer and employed. 

Those were, in truth, the days of the Democracy of man, the 
Republicanism of society; when men were free and equal, indus- 
trially as well as politically; and before man had sunk below the 
dollar, the mere servant of corporate wealth, under whose crush- 
ing weight he can scarce hope even to exist, much less to rise. 

Those were, it is true, days of hard and strenuous labor, for 
the tools and implements were of the rudest, whether in agricul- 
ture or manufacture. Yet even before machinery had come to 
do their work, and when men were far away from the markets, 
and were conquering the wilderness, contending both with the 
savage and beasts of prey, those were, nevertheless, the days 
when our national greatness was born. These hardy and self- 
respecting pioneers, by their very conflict with the outer world. 



THE MODERN CORPORATION A MONSTROSITY 29 

as well as by matching their strength with each other in a free 
and equal struggle, were the fit material out of which a nation 
destined for greatness could alone be built. The incentive to 
provide a home and sustenance for his family, and to take his 
place in the same rank with his neighbors, inspired in every breast, 
whether in country or village, the desire to bring out the best effort 
in each. And the prospect that lay before every youth to rise in 
the counsels and guidance of the nation, inspired the more ambi- 
tious to still more strenuous exertion. 

We have, in fact, but to read the lives of such men as Lincoln, 
and Garfield, and Webster, and Franklin, and hundreds of others, 
to see the hope, and the possibilities, that lay in those lives of 
humble toil, it is true, but of free and independent toil as well. 

But whatever may be thought of the competitive system, its 
advantages, or disadvantages, certain it is that it has long since 
passed away. 

With the coming of machinery, the artisan must leave his shop 
and independent toil, and join his labor with thousands of other 
workmen in the world's great factories and mills. He could not 
hope, with the old simple processes, to compete with mechanical 
production. On the other hand, the machinery and buildings 
required were too expensive, and the capital too great, for him 
to remain his own master under these new conditions. Hence, 
by the very genius of this industrial movement, the toilers of the 
world — their occupation and old-time importance gone — were 
left no choice but to seek employment with the large corporations, 
in the world's great factories, mines, mills, packing houses, de- 
partment stores, and the like; or it may be with our railway and 
other public service corporations. Organization and combination 
were thus everywhere the order of the day; division of labor and 
co-operation of effort was carried to its utmost limit. 

To say that a movement so vast, and a revolution so com- 
plete, has been due to corporate or other governmental inter- 
ference, is wholly to mistake its nature and character; and but 
to resemble the fly in Esop, which, sitting on the chariot wheel, 
said in self-gratulation, "See what a dust I raise!" 

It was brought about, instead, by the progress of invention 
applied to industry, and especially to transportation. It was, 
in short, a natural and inevitable growth, due to the progress of 
human thought and achievement. And so far from contributing 
toward that movement, the private corporation, by diverting 
and corrupting the channels of that progress to serve private 
ends, has been the one means most instrumental in retarding 
that industrial evolution, and converting what should have been 
our chief est blessing into our greatest curse. It has engendered 
a strife and warfare between individuals and classes, that is akin 
to sickness and fever in the human organism; and which is no 



30 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

more necessary to our industrial progress and development, or 
a part thereof, than spinal meningitis is a necessary part of child- 
hood's growth, or the microbes, which are supposed to get into 
our food, are any part or parcel of the sustenance we receive from 
that food. 

The corporation was, in fact, opposed to the whole nature and 
genius of the industrial movement ; and could not have been other 
than injurious in its effects. 

The nature of the industrial movement was co-operative in 
the truest sense. When the workmen no longer toiled each in 
his separate shop, but all united in one large factory, or other 
corporate undertaking, then they were no longer engaged in com- 
peting with one another; but were instead co-operating their 
efforts toward one common result, for the equal benefit of all con- 
cerned. iVloreover, the improved means of transportation ex- 
tended this co-operation throughout the whole body of society. 
The food and other products from the prairies of the west supply 
the table, and clothing of the residents of our cities, and even of 
the world; while the cotton and woolen goods, the clothing, the 
shoes, the hardware, the furniture, and other articles of manu- 
facture, which come from our manufacturing centers, go not only 
to every farm and village throughout the land, but fmd a market 
world-wide. And this same process of exchange is carried on 
for all products of agriculture, of manufacture, and of commerce; 
until, by means of our great railway systems and steamship lines, 
the most distant parts of the globe are little farther apart to-day 
for all purposes of industry and commerce, than neighboring cities 
were three-quarters of a century ago. Thus in this age of in- 
dustrial progress has been built up an harmonious industrial 
organism; in which each part, 6r individual, labors together with 
every other part, or individual, for the satisfaction of the mutual 
and varied wants of all, in one vast co-operative system. 

But if society has thus become co-operative, then it were neces- 
sary that our institutions should correspond. 

Life itself is but the adaptation, whether of plant or ani- 
mal, to its environment. Should either the individual or species 
fail at any time to adapt itself to the conditions in which it is 
placed, then it must necessarily become extinct. Even so of 
rnen in societies ; should any people fail to conform their institu- 
tions to the conditions in which they are placed, or to which they 
may have grown, then there is a lack of adjustment, or disturbance; 
and disease, or even death, must ensue, unless the evils are rem- 
edied. And to this end, government is but the intelligence of col- 
lective society, adapting its relations and institutions to its en- 
vironment. The same institutions could not, therefore, be adapted 
to conditions so totally dissimilar as the old competitive system, 
and the present co-operative one; and we were under the necessity 



THE MODERN CORPORATION A MONSTROSITY 31 

of making some change in our institutions, as we emerged from 
the old condition into the new. Not to have done so would have 
stifled the new industrial movement in its very inception. 

The changes made were, however, altogether curious. Co- 
operation was, as we have seen, the governing principle of the 
new industrial movement; and some means of combination must 
be provided. But competition and warfare had become, as it 
were, second nature to us; while anything hke real co-operation 
was regarded as socialistic, or even anarchistic. 

Hence it was that when our financiers saw the opportunity 
to turn these new industrial changes to their own advantage; and 
our politicians, influenced by the golden arguments which these 
financiers knew so well how to use from the beginning, resur- 
rected for their benefit that same hated and feared corporation, 
they found the public an easy prey to the conspiracy. Unable 
longer to hold to the competition of individual with individual, 
and yet unwilling to exchange this for real co-operation for the 
benefit of all, we accepted what seemed to be a compromise in 
the modern corporation. We placed this in control of industry, 
and of all public utilities, and provided for its unlimited extension 
to embrace any number of men, or amount of capital, and to cover 
any field; thereby enabling it to secure an alDSolute monopoly 
of all industry, as well as of all public services, with the power to 
dictate terms to the whole of society. 

Thus fostered, the once hated and feared corporation has 
taken possession of the industrial world; built up for its owners 
in the space of little more than a quarter of a century, from noth- 
ing, the most colossal fortunes the world has ever seen; and, in 
so doing, has impoverished the world of toil, at the very time when 
mechanical progress had enormously enriched the whole nation. 
It has, too, corrupted our politics, until they are a stench in the 
nostrils of a whole people; and a byword among nations, sapping 
the very foundations of public, and, with it, of private morality. 
It has built up an aristocracy of wealth, having no pursuit but 
dissipation; a plutocracy of power, having no god but greed; 
and converted into mere beasts of burden, and slaves of toil, a 
people once free, and the hope of mankind. 

The corporation as at present constituted is, in fact, a mon- 
strosity from whatever standpoint considered. It belongs neither 
to the competitive system, from which we have emerged, nor yet 
to the co-operative system, toward which we are tending. 

A competitive system presupposes a free competition of equal 
with equal; of individual with individual. In the brute world 
each individual stands upon its own merits; and must depend 
upon its own strength, or cunning, or fleetness, both to preserve 
its life and to destroy its enemies. Hence, in this struggle, the 
stronger and more capable survive, while the weaker, or less capa- 



32 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

ble, must perish. This is the "Struggle for existence, and sur- 
vival of the fittest," which is claimed to justify our competitive 
system. It is admitted that the warfare is a cruel one; but it is 
pointed out that this is a wise provision of an all-wise Providence; 
that this struggle develops the strong and destroys the weak, and 
thus perpetuates only the stronger and more capable. This same 
struggle and warfare has moreover, it is said, obtained in the 
earlier stages of human society; the stronger tribes and nations 
having warred upon and exterminated the weaker ones, thus de- 
veloping the strength of the victors, and destroying the van- 
quished. Hence, it is contended that only by such struggle and 
warfare can the development of industrial society be attained. 
This argument is not without its plausible aspects; and if the 
development of brute strength and brute instincts be indeed the 
true aim of human institutions, it might be accepted as final. 

But if a warfare and strife, which must mean death to so many, 
is to be the order of the day, then must this struggle be kept free 
and equal with men, as it is with brutes, — a conflict of individual 
with individual alone. 

The corporation, however, permits the combining of any num- 
ber of individuals and capitals, all acting as one. To ask the in- 
dividual to compete with this, is as though we should ask him to 
contend single-handed against an organized band, or even against 
an entire nation; and individual effort must everywhere expect 
to go to the wall. It is true the competitors menaced by it, may, 
in turn, unite into other corporations; but this struggle or war- 
fare becomes then one of corporation with corporation, and the 
old competition of individual with individual is as surely at an 
end. This has been the condition of industrial society ever since 
the introduction of the corporation ; and, as the corporation per- 
mits of indefinite extension, it was but to be expected that these 
combinations should in the end cease to war upon each other, 
and combine, as in the trust, to war upon the whole of society. 

Hence the corporation, which we thus created and turned loose 
to war upon the individual, has all but completed its conquest; 
and individual effort has everywhere gone to the wall, crushed 
beneath the gigantic power of this mere creature of the law. We 
have "sown the wind," and now "reap the whirlwind." 

And if this be true of the industrial corporation, much more 
does it hold true of the corporation in control of public services — 
or public utilities — such as money, railways, telegraphs, tele- 
phones, gas and electric lighting, and the like. In addition to 
the advantages possessed by the industrial corporation from its 
colossal size, these have the further advantage of being placed 
in control of natural monopolies, with the power to dictate their 
own terms to the world of labor, as well as to the public at large. 
Such advantage, and such power, is wholly foreign to the idea and 



THE MODERN CORPORATION A MONSTROSITY 33 

nature of the competitive system; and cannot but result in oppres- 
sion and cruelty. 

But if the corporation, as now organized, has thus no place in 
the competitive system, much less can it be said to have any place 
in a co-operative system. 

Co-operation signifies the working together in a spirit of unity, 
a real partnership of all concerned; and this the corporation 
is the farthest possible from securing. Co-operation, in any 
true sense, would give to every competitor supplanted by the 
corporation, the same share in the jomt enterprise as he before 
possessed under competition. It would give to labor, driven from 
Its old independence, a partner's share and freedom in the new 
combination. It would, moreover, admit the public to share in 
its benefits, by providing in some suitable manner for just and 
reasonable prices, before assured by the principle of competition. 

Under the competitive system, each competitor was upon 
terms of equality with every other competitor; one might per- 
haps amass more wealth than another, but they were none the 
the less equals ; while labor was free to choose its own employer, 
and the public to accept or reject the terms offered. When, 
then, co-operation succeeded to competition, each had the right 
to expect the same equality, freedom from dictation, and just 
interest in the result of their common labor, under combina- 
tion, which he had before enjoyed without the combination. 

This free and equal co-operation, however, the corporation 
made no attempt to secure. 

Certainly the individual competitor, driven by it from the 
field, has no share in its benefits any more than the victim of a 
robber has a share in that robbers plunder; while the wage 
earner in its employ is no more a partner of its proud owners 
than is the lackey of some great lord a partner in his lordship's 
estate. And the public, whether as producers or consumers, 
can only be considered the victims, and never the partners of 
the corporation. The competitor was forced from the field by 
its overwhelming size and power, and the laborer, the producer, 
and consumer — comprising practically the whole body of society 
— were compelled to deal with the corporation alone; without 
the benefits of competition, upon which each had before depended 
for just and reasonable terms. 

The corporation has thus been made the creature of private 
interests, the property of the few. For the many, whose efforts 
it has supplanted, and absorbed, it has nothing but a servant's 
stipend and portion to offer. No part have they, either in the 
corporation or in its culmination the trust, now in control of the 
varied fields of industry and of public service; no portion have 
they in the products and results of human labor and effort, before 
the free and equal heritage of all. 



34 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

The farmer may, it is true, still own his farm, the mechanic 
his shop, or the tradesman his store; but the corporation controls 
the prices of all their products and supplies, through transporta- 
tion, packing houses, elevators, mills, boards of trade, stock ex- 
changes, and the like, just as surely as it controls the wages of 
the laborer in its employ, or the products of the trust itself. 

When the farmer's products are ready for shipment, the rail- 
ways dictate the price of shipment, and strip him of all his profits. 
And when these products reach the city, the elevators, packing 
houses, boards of trade, and other corporations, control the prices 
there, and demand their full quota of what remains to him; until 
though nominally independent, the profits of his toil go as surely 
to these corporate masters as though he were a wage earner in 
their employ. But more especially are all the supplies of life, 
of every sort, at the mercy of corporate greed, with the power to 
fix the price of living of every member of society, even as it has 
already fixed the wages and returns to labor and production. 
With the advent of the mere corporation in the field of industry 
the circle of competition was narrowed, and with the develop- 
ment of this into the trust, altogether destroyed; while in the 
field of public service this end was as surely attained almost from 
the beginning, with the very placing of these under private cor- 
porate control. 

The corporation thus introduced a third and anomalous con- 
dition into our social system. Competition it doomed, and co- 
operation it refused; but it brought about a system of corporate 
control and exploitation alike of industry and all public services, 
and gave rise to a new social doctrine in which this is lauded as 
the necessary and proper state of industrial society. 

This brings about a certain kind of co-operation indeed; but 
it is a co-operation of the few, for the purpose of driving all com- 
petitors from business, and dictating the terms of necessity to 
the whole of society. The corporation, even in its simpler form, 
has long been the god of the industrial world; and now, in the 
trusts and other combinations, an infinitely small number of 
great capitalists control the entire field of industry, determining 
practically the wages of labor, the prices of all the products of 
labor and supplies of life, the rates of interest upon money, and 
the charge for all public services of every kind and description. 

Thus have we by means of the corporation brought about a 
state of subjection and inequality not surpassed in the history 
of the world; diverting at once, and by the same process, all our 
enormous wealth production, and all the savings of past genera- 
tions as well, into the overswelling coffers of the indiistrial mas- 
ters of society. And now that this result has been triumphantly 
accomplished, and the power and possessions of the corporation 
fully established, and by our own act, we have, forsooth, preached 



CORPORATION SHOULD BE SOCIAL, CO-OPERATIVE 35 

to US that this condition is inevitable, and therefore right; and 
that any question of it, is but to set ourselves against "natural 
law." Meanwhile, great as are their fortunes, and absolute as 
is their power, these lords of the industrial world are yet vieing 
with each other in a death grapple for more wealth; until what 
with their power to command all the services of industrial society, 
every former despotism will have been insignificant by comparison, 

THE CORPORATION SHOULD BE SOCIAL, 
CO-OPERATIVE 

But if present industrial and social conditions are the result 
alone of human institutions; and if the false and vicious notion 
that man's natural state is one of warfare and hatred, is alone re- 
sponsible therefor; then these institutions and conditions can 
claim no warrant or justification for their continued existence. 
And if government is but the intelligence of collective society, and 
must ever act in adapting its institutions to industrial and other 
conditions, — then what task so fit for it now to perform as to 
remedy the error it has committed, and properly conform our in- 
stitutions to present industrial society. 

If industrial society is co-operative in its nature, then should 
our institutions be also co-operative. 

The corporation should never have been created at all, or should 
have provided for the real co-operation of all the interests sup- 
planted by it, labor as well as capital, instead of being made the 
creature of capital alone. But, above all, the public nature of 
this mere creature of law should never have been lost sight of, and 
it should have ever been, and remained, under public supervision 
and control; this to protect alike labor, investors, and the public, 
and prevent its exploitation in the interests of private greed. 

If capital desired to enter upon individual or partnership under- 
takings, it could have done so. But when the aid of the law was 
invoked, as by the corporation, then the law had the right to pre- 
scribe the exact and absolute terms upon which the combination 
should take place. And these terms should have conformed to 
the nature and requirements of existing society, and not to old 
and outgrown dogmas. If we may not compel the premature 
adoption by society of ideal institutions, neither, on the other 
hand, can we perpetrate that other absurdity and hold society 
in conditions it has outgrown; thereby fostering hate and antag- 
onism, in the midst of an industrial evolution the principle of 
which is peaceful co-operation and combined eifort. Thus, by 
these simple and necessary provisions, the corporation would have 
been made the servant, instead of, as now, the master of indus- 
trial society; and this without in the least interfering with its 
greatest possible extension, and widest range of usefulness. 



36 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

And what government thus failed to do in the first instance, 
it must yet do. If we see an individual pursuing a mistaken 
course, we advise him to reform his conduct, and thus avert his 
ruin. Even so of human institutions. Only by radical reform 
can grave social and industrial diseases be eradicated; and any 
compromise or partial measures can but end in disappoint- 
ment. 

In the first place, public utilities, such as railways, street rail- 
ways, gas and electric lighting, and the like, as also, banks, trust 
companies, insurance companies, and Hke institutions, should 
forever be taken from under corporate control. 

The mere fact that they are public services, in which the 
whole community is interested renders it unsafe to exploit them 
for profit. The citizen cannot provide himself with such services; 
and if these are given over to private corporations for their profit, 
must either go without the services, or pay whatever they see fit 
to extort. But he cannot ordinarily go without the services; 
and hence they charge, as a rule, "all the traffic will bear;" and 
the public must satisfy their demands, or its crops must go un- 
marketed, its supplies be withheld, and the use or money and of 
all other public services be denied. To give this power to private 
greed, is as though we were to license highwaymen at every street 
corner, or cross-roads, to hold up the helpless pas5er-by. Such 
surrender of the interests of its citizens, is not the part of an en- 
lightened government of free people; but represents, instead, 
the betrayal of the interests of the people, by their public servants, 
for the paltry dollars of these corporations. It enslaves a people, 
and besieges them, and cuts off their means of life and supply, 
except as they pay tribute to the corporations, to whom they and 
all their labor and means of living are sold. 

That these franchises and properties should be reclaimed, goes 
without saying. No plea of * vested rights" can be heard to the 
contrary; for the maxim is universal that "private must yield 
to public welfare;" and obedient to this maxim, the citizen's 
property was condemned, and even his home taken from him, 
in the building of these highways. Much less, then, in the restor- 
ation to the people of these, their inalienable rights, involving 
their liberty and even their lives in the truest sense, can any such 
plea avail the corporations, whose possession has never been any- 
thing but wrongful, and who have already so largely profited by 
that wrong. 

The trust itself should, moreover, be taken possession of and 
operated by the people. 

Had the corporation been made in the beginning co-operative 
and public, instead of an instrument of private greed, then in 
the natural evolution of industry it would have extended itself 
as now, but all the benefits would have gone to the people, and 



CORPORATION SHOULD BE SOCIAL, CO-OPERATIVE 37 

the corporation would have been their servant instead of their 
master. But since this wise and only rational course was not 
adopted; and since, through our mistake, and the fraud prac- 
ticed upon us, the corporations have seized upon all the products 
of labor and supplies of life of a whole people, with the power to 
dictate absolute terms both to the world of labor and of living, — 
then there remains now no other alternative than for the people 
themselves to take possession of these trusts, even as they must 
take possession of their public service corporations. 

Were the corporation itself innocent of any taint of fraud, its 
development into the trust would, nevertheless, make this a 
right, and necessary, thing to do. The control of a people's 
products and suppUes, like their hberties or their Hves, cannot be 
bartered or given away; and were they voluntarily to make such 
surrender, they must yet have the right to repudiate the folly 
upon coming to their senses. The very nature of the rights parted 
with raises the presumption, not to be rebutted, that they were 
ignorant of the nature of their act. 

But the corporation has not been innocent of the taint of fraud. 
On the contrary, it has been, as we have seen, the creature of cor- 
ruption and fraud from the very beginning. The lobbyists of these 
corporations have filled every legislative body; and their agents 
have masqueraded as the servants of the people, while building 
up the power and wealth of the corporations, until this has reached 
the pomt where trusts are possible. 

The trust is, moreover, a conspiracy not justified by our cor- 
poration laws themselves. It is true that the corporation, by 
being made the creature solely of private interest, with no limit 
to the capital or business plants included, nor upon the profits 
it may extort, has permitted of trust combination; and our cor- 
porate laws are thus a party to the wrong. But not even the hire- 
lings and creatures of the corporations, who procured the passage 
of these laws, could have had in contemplation the combining 
together of all the corporations throughout the country, in order 
to control one after another the products and supplies of a whole 
nation, thereby to extort from the people all their earnings and 
swell the colossal fortunes of our trust billionaires. The corrupt 
procuring of the laws was but the purchasing of the weapon; 
trust formation is the red-handed use of that weapon, which 
now shocks the public into a sense of its danger. To say that the 
people have not the right to put an end to these practices, is as 
though we were to deny them the right to protect themselves 
against a pirate crew or robber band. They must have this ri^ht 
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, if our Declaration 
of Independence is aught but words, or our Constitution itself 
anything but an idle mockery. 

But manifestly, then, the only feasible course is for the people 



38 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

to take charge of the trusts, even as of the public service corpora- 
tions. 

It were certainly both idle and useless to talk of disintegrat- 
ing the trusts into the separate corporations from which they 
were formed. This would be but to commit the folly of a return 
to positions outgrown. Had the corporation been in the first 
instance rightly formed, larger and ever larger combinations would 
still have been inevitable; but the public would have reaped all 
the benefit, instead of these benefits going, as now, to the corpora- 
tions. To, then, forfeit all the results of our industrial evolution, 
simply because we have thus far most foolishly deprived ourselves, 
by unwise laws, of just participation in its benefits, would neither 
remedy the evil we have committed, nor furnish any solution of 
the industrial question. We should rather seek to place industrial 
society now in the position it would have been, had our course 
been well considered in the first instance; and this can only be 
accomplished by the public taking charge of the trust. 

It would, in fact, be a task beyond human power to restore all 
independent partnerships and corporations, absorbed and routed 
by the trust, to their former positions; much less could they be 
placed in the positions they would now occupy had not the trust 
driven them from the field. And certainly no restoration would 
be possible to ruined competitors, defrauded investors, or to the 
ranks of labor, and the whole body of industrial society both as 
producer and consumers, from whose earnings and savings the 
trust financiers have amassed their billions. But the one con- 
sideration must still stand out in burning characters; and this is, 
that the position and power of these brigands of the industrial 
world is both wrong in itself, and has been wrongfully obtained; 
and not only the welfare, but the very existence, of industrial 
society demands this surrender of their power to the people, who 
should themselves own and operate the trusts as well as all public 
utilities. 

Only thus, in fact, can anything in the nature of restitution 
be made; and this is quite as important and necessary to be 
effected, as the remedy of future ills. 

The purchase of public utilities from the corporations, is, in- 
deed, now generally advocated ; and we presume the same alterna- 
tive will be proposed with regard to the trusts, when the people 
shall have become thoroughly aroused as to what they mean, as 
also to the futility, as well as inadequacy, of all attempts to curb 
or smash them. But this acknowledges the right in these cor- 
porations to insist upon such terms as they please, or even abso- 
lutely to refuse to sell until their franchises and privileges shall 
have expired; thus postponing indefinitely, and rendering prac- 
tically null, any attempt at a real remedy. The proposition is, 
moreover, in any just estimate, deliciously ludicrous. The sim- 



CORPORATION SHOULD BE SOCIAL, CO-OPERATIVE 39 

plicity of the countryman who "locked the stable after the horse 
was stolen," was sage wisdom by comparison. It is as though 
that countryman, with the thief openly parading his stolen horse 
in his plain sight, should have hypnotized himself into the belief 
that the possession of that thief was evidence of property, and 
sacred; and while still in that hypnotic state, should have pro- 

Cosed to mortgage his farm and future labor, in order to purchase 
ack his stolen property. 

If, through the misconduct of their public servants, the people 
have been defrauded of the possession of their public highways, as 
also of industry itself, then their right to repossess themselves of 
these properties and franchises is the same as that of the indi- 
vidual to repossess himself of his property, whether lost or stolen. 
The deprivations and wrongs of the past can never be remedied; 
and all the wealth that has thus far gone to supply the lavish and 
sinful waste of these arch plunderers of the industrial world, may 
not be restored to the people; but all the plundered wealth that 
yet remains, including the franchises and properties, is theirs to 
recover and possess. 

, To attempt such purchase would, indeed, entail upon indus- 
trial society an impossible burden. 

It is stated* that the income of John D. Rockefeller is 172,000,- 
000 per year. If this is true, then the wealth of that individual 
alone, judged by its earning power, is to-day not far from |2,- 
500,000,000; and before any reform can be effected will undoubt- 
edly be $3,000,000,000. Nlow, inasmuch as the net earnings of 
the whole people are only 13,000,000,000 per annum, it would 
require all the earnings of all the people of the nation for a whole 
year, to satisfy the demands of this one individual alone, in the 
event of such purchase. But he is only one of thousands of the 
enormously rich; and the class, of which he is representative, 
possess practically ninety per cent, of the 1 1 06,000,000,000 given 
as our national wealth. Not all the labor of all the people would, 
then, suffice to maintain the interest charge alone upon this plun- 
der; and as well might a slave, all whose toil belongs to an abso- 
lute master, hope to purchase its freedom, as industrial society 
to undertake such purchase, and then hope even to lighten its 
debt burden. 

Aside from the contradiction it implies, and the hardship it 
must entail, the purchase by society of these possessions would 
perpetuate an aristocracy of wealth, having no occupation but 
the search for pleasure and power, and quite as formidable then 
as now. It would take all the profits from production and indus- 
try, leaving the whole of industrial society in the future, as at 
present, but "hewers of wood and drawers of water" for these 
lords of the industrial world. It would convert this into an im- 

*See The New York Commercial, January — , 1905. 



40 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

mense corruption fund, in the hands of an idle class trained to 
ambition and power. Many might be content with this perpetual 
mortgage upon the labor of the whole nation, and spend their 
incomes upon pleasure; but who can doubt that the great lords 
of finance who now dominate the industrial world, would still 
thirst for power; and, conversant with all the corrupt methods of 
our politics, would use the same criminal methods to build up a 
newer power, as those employed to build up their present pos- 
sessions and power? 

Besides, such half-way action, or compromise, would be as 
wrong and unjust as it would be impolitic. All these possessions 
have been created alone by the labor of industrial society; and 
to it, and it alone, they justly belong. 

If, therefore, these possessions have found their way into the 
hands of the present possessors through unjust laws, through 
bribery, corruption, fraud, and other criminal misconduct, which 
the people could not foresee or prevent, then the people cannot do 
less than demand a full return both of the properties and all the 
accumulated wealth therefrom. Their right to this wealth is 
exactly commensurate with their right to take possession of the 
properties themselves. The return of the goods of which they 
have been despoiled, is quite as important, and altogether as just, 
as the prevention of further spoilation. It is enough that they 
have been so long defrauded of their just possessions, and com- 
pelled to toil in the service, and at the dictation, of the wrongful 
appropriators ; without assuming this voluntary and dangerous 
additional burden of perpetual toil, in order to come into the pos- 
session of their own again, or rather into what would be but a 
hollow mockery of that possession. This wealth, thus plundered 
from a nation's toil, either belongs to these plunderers or to the 
society from which they have plundered it; and to one or the 
other it must go in the end. Industrial society must make its 
choice between the two horns of the dilemma; it must be the judge 
of its own rights, as also the enforcer of its own decrees; and from 
its decision there is no appeal, as no recourse from its action. 

The corporation, then, in all its ramifications, industrial, finan- 
cial, and public service, should be taken from under the control 
of private interests, and made co-operative in the workers, by 
them to be administered for the common good; it should be, in 
fact, a social not a selfish institution. 

This simple reform of the corporation, both in the field of 
public service and of industry, will free all our public services, 
and industry itself, from the enormous tax now levied thereupon 
by concentrated wealth; and will restore to the body of society, 
in the only practicable manner, all the wealth of which it has been 
plundered. It will, in fact, remedy practically all the ills from 
which industrial society now suffers, with the single exception of 



NATURE AND JUSTICE OF THE REQUIRED REMEDY 41 

the land question alone. All the vast enterprises built up by 
our great ''Captains of industry," so called, through the plunder 
of the public, are in the form of corporations; while all the in- 
vestment of that plunder, but to perpetuate the power of concen- 
trated wealth, remains in the corporations, with the almost single 
exception of investments in land. 

Restore, then, the corporation to the people, stripped of this 
plunder, and the reign of concentrated wealth is at an end; Wall 
Street, with other hke gambling institutions, will be a thing of 
the past; and the defrauding of investors, by our high-fmanciers, 
will be no longer possible. And even as to the land question, the 
right application of the corporate principle and function to mines 
and mineral resources, as also to landed property in crowded 
centers required for joint use and occupancy, would as effectually 
solve that as every other problem of our industrial system. 

The further plunder of industrial society will thus be pre- 
vented; and the plunder already taken from it will be restored. 
Labor will become a full partner in all the benefits and savings 
of the corporation. The farmer or other producer will get the 
full value of his products, when these are freed from the burden 
of the colossal fortunes now levied by high-fmanciers through 
transportation, trust control, and other forms of extortion. The 
cost of all public service, as also of all supplies, will at the same 
time be proportionately reduced to the consumer; and living will 
share in the general benefit. In short, all the vast created wealth 
of the world of industry, will remain in the body of society by 
which it is created, — instead of, as now, but going to swell the 
enormous fortunes of our high-financiers, — and will surely and 
equally inure to every member in better wages and larger profits, 
in cheaper prices, and in freedom from debt, as also from the 
1 uin and speculative losses due to present conditions. 

NATURE AND JUSTICE OF THE REQUIRED REMEDY 

But we shall hear of "confiscation of property;" and Mr. 
Carnegie gravely assures us* that, "upon the sacredness of 'prop- 
erty' civilization itself depends; the right of the laborer to his 
hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the legal right 
of the millionaire to his millions." We are informed that all who 
attack concentrated wealth are communists or anarchists, and 
are enemies not only of society and civilization, but equally so of 
the humble wage earner himself; that once the foundations of 
"property" are undermined, no man's possessions, however hum- 
ble, will be secure. This being the case, every good citizen must, 
of course, rush to the defence of these millions; and repel every 
question of them, as an assault upon the wages of his own 
humble toil. 

*" Gospel of Weahh," Andrew Carnegie. Page 5 



42 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

The term ''property" does not,| however, signify alone the 
mere fact of possession, but rightful possession as well. The same 
law which assures the honest toiler the peaceful possession of his 
wage, both punishes the thief and recovers the stolen goods. 

Plunder is not property. If it were so, the taking of the coun- 
terfeiter's coin, or the pirate's ship, could also be called a confisca- 
tion of " property ! " Yet we calmly proceed to this work of "con- 
fiscation;" and even go so far as to '* confiscate" the Hberty of 
each, until such time as he shall learn the real meaning of both 
"liberty" and "property." And these vast exploited fortunes, 
wrung from the toil of a whole nation, partake very largely of 
the character both of that coin and that ship. For these are 
"made dollars" standing for no just labor or return, and traded 
to the people ignorant of the fraud and crime; and now, in the 
trust and other combinations, they are used in piracy pure 
and simple, on the high seas of commerce, to relieve all the 
people of their substance, — an act as much more heinous than 
common piracy as the public is more helpless against the 
depredation. 

The charge, too, of "Socialism" is frequently made against 
any proposal for the people to take charge of their public utilities 
and other equally vital concerns. Socialism, we are told, is ideal 
but not practical ; man's nature is essentially selfish, and he must 
have selfish institutions; only by means of competition, and a 
" struggle for existence " is his development obtained; and any 
other state could but result in his stagnation; would, in fact, be 
destructive of all progress. As a result of these and other like 
attractive arguments. Socialism has come to be looked upon as 
a name of dread. 

Hence it was, that when the invention of machinery made it 
necessary to provide some means by which men might work to- 
gether, instead of separately, we could think of no alternative but 
to create the modern corporation, not as a means of real co-opera- 
tion, but instead as a warring and selfish factor in our industrial 
and social system, to the inevitable destruction of individual effort 
in the whole field of industry. This was our only escape from that 
other much dreaded alternative, — the peaceable co-operation of 
men for their common benefit. And if, by means of these cor- 
porations both pubUc and private, practically all the wealth of 
the world — the savings of the past, and the earnings of the pres- 
ent^has found its way in the space of two generations into the 
possession of their owners; if we have to-day the greatest and 
most numerous fortunes the world has ever seen, in the midst of 
general poverty; if we have our billionaires, and our million of 
unemployed; — we accepted these conditions gladly, in our blind 
infatuation for the god of selfishness we worshipped. Thus, 
and governed by such considerations as these, have we built up 



NATURE AND JUSTICE OF THE REQUIRED REMEDY 43 

the power of the corporation and of concentrated wealth; until 
competition is more surely at an end than were Socialism itself 
the order of the day. 

But if this be the case, then must the cry even of "Sociahsm" 
fall upon deaf ears. We are, in fact, no longer asked to decide 
between competition on the one hand, and co-operation on the 
other; but instead, between co-operation for the benefit of the 
many, or co-operation for the benefit of the few. 

In the old days, when competition still obtained, men mi^ht 
have preferred to fight each other for the results of their joint 
labor, rather than peaceably to divide this among themselves. 
Their prejudices, their brute instincts, as also their hope of per- 
sonal advantage, would have been appealed to; and these argu- 
ments would have had some force. But when it comes to a choice 
between giving all the fruits of their toil to the high-financiers 
of the day, and toiling for these in the character of servants; or, 
on the other hand, dividing with each other these fruits, as free 
and equal partners in all the vast enterprises of the age, we ap- 
prehend that none save the few who profit by the present situa- 
tion can long hesitate. If the turning over by our institutions 
of all the fruits of our toil to savage and insatiate greed, be "In- 
dividualism," the citizen may come in the end to reconcile him- 
self to Socialism as a desirable alternative. And if the corrup- 
tion and plunder, the colossal fortunes and dire want, we every- 
where behold around us, stand for "American," the citizen may 
even consent to be Un-American. 

If, for example, a dozen men were cast by shipwreck upon a 
soHtary island; and the choice was presented to them in cold 
blood, either to share that island and its products in peace among 
themselves as equal partners, or to turn it over to one or two 
among them as their absolute private property, all the others 
to toil in their service for a grudging existence, or even this denied 
them, to beg or starve as best they might ; — we suspect that neither 
the name nor the inducements of "IndividuaHsm" could win the 
consent of the remaining number to this latter course, so long as 
they remained in possession of their senses. They would answer, 
that any such arrangement must deprive every one of all true in- 
centive to exertion ; that those given this possession and mastery 
could only be tempted either to luxury on the one hand or rapa- 
city on the other; while those who were thus robbed of their pos- 
sessions, and the fruits of their toil, must lack both the hope and 
courage essential whether to exertion or progress. 

And even so must industrial society to-day turn from such 
doctrine and practice, if it would come into possession of its own 
again, and free itself from the worse than Egyptian bondage in 
which its labor and living are now held. The fact is, that he who 
is not at heart a Socialist, in this age, is but a political Rip Van 



44 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

Winkle, asleep to the world's progress, clad in the tattered rem- 
nants of an old political philosophy, and peering forth in stupid 
amazement upon a changing order he either cannot or will not 
comprehend. Socialism means but the socialization of industry; 
and, as we have seen, this socialization has already taken place. 
It but remains, then, for us intelligently and sensibly to recog- 
nize this fact, and conform thereto; to the end that industrial 
society be no longer crippled by institutions unfitted to it; and 
in order that social and industrial health may at last obtain. 

The difficulty seems to be that our ideas of Socialism, like 
those of Don Quixote regarding chivalry, have been obtained 
from old writers, or from the reading of romances; and like him 
we then go forth to wage valiant battle with the windmills of our 
own creation. Thus it is that sociaUsm has become identified in 
the popular mind with a sort of universal "trading stamp" sys- 
tem, whereby each individual is to have a certain credit to draw 
upon the public fund, without regard to what he may have earned 
or any question of desert. 

Yet with this Utopian dream the Socialism of to-day has 
little in common, except that it is based upon the social rather 
than the selfish principle. The platform of socialism but de- 
clares for the collective ownership of "the common means of 
production and exchange." And when we shall decide, as de- 
cide we must, that the corporation, industrial, financial, and 
public service, shall belong to the workers, and be controlled col- 
lectively by them, as also apply the like corporate principle and 
function to mines, and to such lands in our crowded centers as 
are required for joint use and occupancy, we shall not only remedy 
the iniquities of our present industrial system, but also inaugurate, 
in the most practicable manner, the one solution of our social and 
industrial problem — practical, scientific socialism. And this we 
will eventually be driven to do by the logic of events, either con- 
sistently and as a whole, or blunderingly and piecemeal, as now 
demanded in the current agitation for public ownership and other 
like political makeshifts of the hour. 

Under the corporation, indeed, competition becomes a farce, 
and the doctrine of the "Struggle for existence and survival of 
the fittest" arrant nonsense. 

Even if the aim of our institutions be the development of the 
brute faculties alone, this was forever defeated by the creation 
of the corporation to war upon individual effort, which is doomed 
in every field, unable to cope with its unequal and monstrous 
power. Every vestige of equality and freedom which obtains 
with the brute or savage in this "struggle" is thus destroyed, and 
man is made the victim of his own institutions. To make that 
doctrine applicable at all, we would have to disintegrate society, 
abolish government, and return to the state of the brute or sav- 



NATURE AND JUSTICE OF THE REQUIRED REMEDY 45 

age, without institutions, without machinery, or factories, or rail- 
ways, or any but the simplest tools, each individual dependent 
upon his own efforts alone, without help or co-operation from his 
fellows. Every law we enact, every institution we adopt, every 
invention, and all progress — in short, all that makes industrial 
society civilized or industrial — but increases the hardships, and 
heightens the absurdity, of applying the selfish principle to gov- 
ern human relations. And sooner or later, whether at the elev- 
enth hour, or at the twelfth when it will have become too late, 
we shall have to recognize the fact that not the selfish principle, 
but its opposite, is the true law of industrial society, even though 
it tear every old and darling superstition from its place and moor- 
ings in our affections. 

If we leave the realm of speculation and consult experience 
alone, it would, indeed, be difficult to explain how the conditions 
we behold around us to-day as the result of our social doctrines 
and practices, are or can be productive of any real development. 

Certainly this is not to be hoped for from the idlers of society, 
exempted by their vast possessions from any useful exertion what- 
soever. Their god is pleasure alone; how to amuse themselves 
for the hour is the one aim of their existence; and to achieve this 
end they hesitate at no expense, nor set the limit to any folly. 
Nor yet can we expect this from the mere beasts of burden of our 
industrial system, whose every energy is employed in the desper- 
ate effort but to keep the wolf from the door. From the lives of 
idleness and debauchery of the one class, or of grinding toil and 
squahd want of the other, humanity can have nothing to hope. 
There must be leisure and hope for man ; there must be incentive 
to exertion, as well as opportunity for development, if he would 
achieve the great and useful end.s of his existence. And here, 
instead of patriotism and love of kind, we behold selfishness, and 
hatred, and resentment, and strife, and corruption, and fraud, 
and all that goes to make life, both individual and national, un- 
desirable and fraught with danger. 

Indeed, it could hardly be otherwise. That father who should 
teach his children that their proper occupation in life is to tear 
at each other's throats, and endeavor by every means in their 
power to destroy each other, must expect to find his home dis- 
cordant and hateful — a society of criminals. And to preach the 
like social doctrine, is but to make of men aggregated together in 
society a body of human cannibals. The stronger and more dar- 
ing will, of course, oppress and destroy the weaker and less sav- 
age. Nor is the fact greatly altered when we make the strife 
industrial instead of physical. If hatred and strife still rule, 
they will bring out the results of hatred and strife; and many 
will be crowded away from the means of life, to satisfy the insa- 
tiate greed of the more grasping and unscrupulous. Corruption 



46 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

and fraud, instead of mere brute force, will enter; and human in- 
stitutions will be employed to oppress and render helpless the 
body of the people. 

And thus will be brought about, and thus has been brought 
about, industrial warfare and strife carried to the very point of 
extermination, that would shame the ferocious instincts of can- 
nibal tribes. The savage instincts of these are confined to the 
destruction of those outside of their own tribe; while with us it 
has victimized the great mass of our own people engaged in hon- 
est toil, but to swell the colossal possessions of the insatiate few 
through a seizure upon all the supplies of life, as hostile armies 
are alone supposed to war against an enemy nation. And this 
in a peaceful society preaching the doctrine of the Christ ! Verily 
of human institutions, as of men, must we exclaim with him, — 
" By their fruits ye shall know them!" 

Hence it is that within the space of half a century we have 
built up an aristocracy of wealth, the like of which required Rome 
or Russia five hundred years to develop. We can boast a single 
citizen whose income perhaps exceeds the combined incomes of 
all the sovereigns of Europe or of Asia; while we have scores, 
and even hundreds of others whose single incomes probably ex- 
ceed those of any of the monarchs of the Old World. 

This doctrine has, besides, in the midst of the greatest and 
most rapid Wealth production the world has ever witnessed, left 
practically the whole of society, by whose labor alone all this 
wealth has been created, dependent upon their daily earnings for 
life itself; or, the right to labor denied them, has driven them 
forth in ever increasing numbers to beg or starve. It has in this 
new civilization changed, in the short space of a half century, a 
band of free and liberty-loving yeomen, who left their homes in 
the Old World in search of religious liberty, into a nation whose 
every nobler aspiration is buried in the pursuit and worship of 
wealth alone. It has created a luxuriously idle class, with no ob- 
ject or pursuit in life but pleasure; and has corrupted our politics 
which brought forth a Washington, a Jefferson, and a Lincoln, until 
they are on a par with the politics of Greece in the time of Philip, 
or Rome in the time of the Caesars. It has created a war of classes, 
in which the smouldering wrath and resentment of men at the 
injustice and oppression from which they suffer, is ready at all 
times to break forth in riot and bloodshed. We have sown the 
dragon's teeth of hatred, and are reaping Jehovah's curse as pro- 
nounced by the prophet against a degenerate people: "And I 
will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians; and they shall fight 
every man against his brother, and every man against his neigh- 
bor;" to which he significantly adds:—' The princes of Zoan are 
fools; the counsel of the wise counsellors of Pharoah is become 
brutish." 



INATURE AND JUSTICE OF THE REQUIRED REMEDY 47 

Yet from all this costly and bitter experience, we are slowly 
coming to learn that not in brute warfare, but in his departure 
from this, man's true welfare is to be found, and his civilization 
begins. Each step of his progress has been away from brute 
instincts, toward the humane and moral in his character. In 
the family, the most primitive human relation, we find the paci- 
fic principle; and as men aggregated into tribes and nations this 
same principle was carried into these larger relations. The great- 
ness, whether of individuals or of nations, has, indeed, consisted 
alone in the devotion to high ideals, to country and to kind; 
while on the other hand, just in proportion as men and nations 
have lapsed back into the selfish and savage instincts, they have 
become weak and degenerate. Much more, then, when society 
became industrial, and "Beat its swords into ploughshares, and 
its spears into pruninghooks," did there go forth the fiat of " Peace 
on earth and good will to men;'' and it but remained for us to 
shape our institutions upon this principle, to have reaped the full 
benefits of our progress, and achieved the complete and final 
emancipation of man. 

And it but remains for us now to use the means which the 
corporation has itself provided, in order to yet reap the fruits of 
that progress and bring about that emancipation. It is only the 
exploitation of the corporation in the interest of selfish greed of 
which we have, in fact, any cause for complaint. In itself it is 
a necessary and inevitable institution. Since combination was 
the necessary outgrowth of industrial conditions, some means of 
combination must be provided; and this the corporation alone 
could adequately and efficiently secure. On several grounds, 
indeed, we have no cause for other than gratulation because of 
its very exploitation. The mad selfishness to which it was due, 
as well as to which it has again so largely contributed, has per- 
haps brought about the organization of industry sooner than 
could have been accomplished by any other means. It has, too, 
in the very excesses to which it has led, exposed the full naked- 
ness of the selfish principle upon which it was based. ''Whom 
the Gods would destroy they first make mad," runs the adage; 
and of greed and rapacity in all its aspects may well be exclaimed 
in the words that hurried Duncan's murderer to his doom, — 

" If it were done when 'tis done 
Then 'twere well it were done quickly." 

The present corporate regime is, in fact, but the reductio ad ab- 
surdam of capitalism ; and even as it has on the one hand accom- 
plished the organization which gives promise of better things, so 
also, on the other hand, is it calculated to shock the public mind 
into a sense of the necessity for a change. It requires, indeed, no 
acceptance of the theory of "surplus value," or other doctrine 



48 THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH 

of Socialism, to bring men to resent, with all the power that in 
them lies, a condition in which not one, but a thousand, great 
combinations have each of them the power to dictate the terms 
of labor, and tax the living of every citizen in the land, by means 
of their absolute control of industry, of all supplies, and of all 
public services of every nature and description — a tax a thousand 
times more dangerous, and ten thousand times more extortionate, 
than the few pence per pound upon tea or the trifling stamp duty 
which fanned into a flame the ' spirit of '76." 

Or, should we yet remain insensate, this power and this greed 
so crystalized, and so fed, is inexorable as fate, as insatiable as the 
mouth of hell. The struggle is not becoming, it already is, one to 
the very death. As witness our million of unemployed; as witness 
the starving thousands in our cities; as witness the grinding 
drudgery of practically the whole body of industrial society, but 
to keep the wolf from the door; as witness the awful fear of want 
stalking relentless as the gaunt figure of Time by the side of every 
toiler; as witness, too, our vast creation of wealth; our boasted 
conquest of the world's markets; our relentless billions amassed 
but to swell the pride and power of the insatiate few, who Httle 
reck of the privation and misery they cause; as witness, again, the 
sullen hate, the fierce struggle, and the deadly conflict, that ever 
and again ensue. 

In the presence of such spectres as these, men will be driven 
by the logic of events, by the stern necessity of the situation, 
to demand nothing less than their entire freedom. From the 
empty jargon of promises to control, or curb, or smash these cor- 
porations they will turn in disgust, as but the inane mouthings 
of the minions of capitalism. From the pitiful makeshift of pub- 
lic ownership upon the basis of purchase, or any other alleged 
remedy which leaves these arch plunderers in control of their 
ill gotten gains, and with this of their criminal power as well, 
they will turn to demand at last, as demand they must, not only 
the control by the workers of all these corporations, but also to 
reclaim all the plundered fruits of their toil: They will demand 
that capitalism itself shall cease. They will lay aside their pre- 
judices, and forget their fears. They will cease to quibble about 
names. They will cease, too, question as to what use they will 
make of their freedom, or whether after all they are fit to be free. 
Even as their ancestors who fought on the memorable fields of 
" '76," they will be driven to relegate these considerations to their 
proper after time and place; and bend all their energies to the 
one paramount task of winning back, from those who have usurped 
and exploited it, their industrial freedom ; trusting to their own 
intelligence to solve every after question. 



COMMENTS UPON 

"THE COMING REVOLUTION" 

BY HEI^RY IxATJFlEasrS CJ^ZjJL, 

It is an exceedingly creditable effort, fused after wading through endless words. 

—American Newsman, N. V. City. ^Burlington Hawkeye. 

It is the production of a broad scholar, a vigorous presentation of the changes 

not a social qx2C[^.— Christian Advocate society is passing through in industrial 

{New York.") and economic ways, as if in preparation 

" The Coming Revolution " is an able for the new century that will soon be upon 

work, and makes a plea for the cause of the world. — Brooklyn Eagle. 

\2bor^ Hartford {Conn.) Times. ^j^j^ ^^j^^^ j^ ^ comprehensive and 

This IS an economic study that holds ^ell-written survey of existing social con- 

thereaderin agripof fascinationfromthe ^j^j^^^ ^j^j^ their scientific remedy.- 5-^. 

first page to the last.— Z^j Angeles Ttmes. y^^^ ^^^ york 

It is a blast against the present con- ^,' ». , . ' , j 

dition of things in the social, financial, . The book is strong, clear, and con- 

and political viOi\d..— Transcript Monthly Ymcing. This work ought to become the 

{Portland Me ) hand-book of the industrial millions m 

That the ' author has made a deep their struggle for their fundamental rights 

study of the existing state of affairs in based on justice.— z:^^ Arena. 

this country is evident. — Florida Times- The thought of the book is powerful 

Union, Jacksonville., Fla. and developed with a master's hand. 

In a time prolific of superfluous pub- Every chapter intensifies the preceding 

lications on the industrial question, Mr. ones. The last chapter might well be 

Call has written a book that demands circulated by millions as a tract. — Ottawa 

serious attention. — Conservator {Phila.y Journal. 

Fa.) In every chapter Mr. Call betrays the 

Henry Laurens Call discusses lumin- scholar and philosopher, as well as the 

ously in "The Coming Revolution" the profound student of sociological and 

economic problems which are to-day dis- economic questions.— Gov. L. D. Lew- 

tressing all earnest thinkers. — Philadelphia elling. 

^^"^- ^ . ^ , . „ 1 , Competent critics who have examined 

'*The Coming Revolution" solves the ^^e book all agree that it is the most 

last great problem of civilization, human comprehensive, logical, clear, and schol- 

equahty. I wish every working man and ^rly presentation of the "new thought" 

woman in America would read it.— ^j^^t has yet appeared.— i'/«j^wrf (Pa ) 

Hon. J. B. Sovereign, JC. of L. ^^^^^ j- rt- 

Drehlnsivf writV^'te^h?^^^^^^ us^^a We are glad to see such a book as 

SsefuTanl t^uSg piSSre' oUhrfeading Jlli^u,^;;5,^"^^^^^^^^^ 

features of the coming industrial revolu- ^^} ""^^^^Zf^^ f^l^^ l^r.^ 4ll 

ution.-5a« Francisco Call. ^^ .^Y^s open to good purpose. The 

I am very sure that no student of poli- b^^^ '%^^Tk^' argumentative^ ^^'^S^'^'f;; 

tical science will regret reading the book. ^0^^' ^''^ y^^ hopef ul.-7V^.z^ York Herald, 
It is the most suggestive and philo- "The Coming Revolution" is a scien- 

sophical treatise that has come to my tific, cold-blooded, mathematical analysis 

attention.— U. S. Senator B. R. Till- of modern industrial society, in which the 

MAN. tangled web of economic falsities, incon- 

The author explains with admirable sistencies, and anomalies is shown with 

clearness what others have talked about the clearness of demonstration of a pro- 

in a way to leave the reader doubly con- f essor of anatomy.— AVw York World. 

Note The above work is undergoing careful revision. Orders received now 

will be filled as soon as the book is issued from the press — H. L. C. 

Price: Cloth, $1.00. Postpaid. 



THE CHANDLER PUBLISHING CO., BOSTON, MASS. 



APR 8 1907 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 719 929 4 



